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Gadget Week - what shall we cover?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 2 Jan 09, 09:01 GMT

I'm off to San Francisco and Las Vegas this weekend to attend Macworld and the Consumer Electronic Show for a series of reports on TV, on radio and on this blog. We're calling it Gadget Week.

When you sign up to cover events like these, and hand over your e-mail address, you are bombarded for weeks with press releases urging you to cover the products of thousands of companies. Each of them issues what seems like a compelling invitation to come to their stand and see something truly innovative.

So one says I should "Come and Meet the New HeatShift by ThermaPAK Technologies. New must-have laptop accessory". Another insists I should "Please try to make an appointment or drop by to see our award-winning eco-friendly packaging products." Should I rush to film "the world's first multi-user, multi-touch interactive learning center designed specifically for early education?" Or maybe "a fully interactive online music and dance website that links directly to people's iPods" is worth a look? What about "the first ever internet-connected gardening device?"

It becomes impossible to see the wood for the trees and after a while, I'm afraid, just about all of these e-mails get deleted unread. We could just get to the shows, see what takes our fancy, and busk it. But television, at least, does need a little advance planning - so here is what we are thinking of featuring right now.

Macworld

The only other time I've attended this event was when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone - which provided us with one big story. This time, of course, Mr Jobs is not attending - and that means we are not betting on any major product launches. But there are some fascinating questions to be answered. Will there be a cheap "netbook"? Probably not - why would Apple want to get into a product category where profit margins are so slim? Will there be a new device - or perhaps an updated Apple TV - to give the firm a bigger role in online video? Will iTunes begin to offer a subscription service? Could we see an iPhone nano? Inevitably, though, a lot of the coverage is likely to focus not on products, but on the future direction of the company. Will Apple just bunker down for the hard economic times ahead - or will it use its huge cash pile to snap up some smaller businesses? And of course the really big question - what happens to Apple if and when its charismatic leader decides it is time to hand over the reins to someone else?

CES

Right now, we're planning two big themes for our television reports from Las Vegas - the future of television, and recession tech, by which we mean smaller, leaner less power-hungry gadgets for these difficult times.

So we hope to look at how far OLED has got on delivering on the promise of the thinnest screens with the sharpest pictures, at somewhat more realistic prices than we've seen to date. We will be filming 3-D televisions(in 2-D, sadly), tiny projectors that can throw a video from your MP3 player onto the bedroom wall, and those glasses that project a movie onto the lenses.

If 2008 saw the rise of the netbook, we expect to see dozens more small, savvy devices on show at CES. In halls packed with enough kit to drain several local power plants, there will be plenty of companies claiming that their products are planet-friendly - or can even cut your energy bills.

We will also be keeping an eye on the development of touchscreen in all sorts of devices, trying to work out whether we're any closer to building a "digital home" that can be worked without a computer science degree, and looking at just how much progress Blu-Ray has made since it won the high-definition format battle last year.

So those are our early plans - but we expect to have them derailed by the unexpected. And if you've some thoughts on what we should be chasing down in San Francisco and Las Vegas, do let us know.

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