CES Day -2: Nice event, lousy facilities

CES 2010 doesn’t officially kick off until Thursday (US time), but the press activities start two days early. First task for me was to head to the Storage Visions conference. In previous years this has handily been at the Flamingo, which is just next door, but now it’s moved to the Riviera, which is a less handy 30 minute walk down the road. Ah well, at least I’ll get some exercise, and there’s no-one much around at 7am.

It also proved a good source of stories. Two went up at APC, one looking at how hard drive prices might actually not go down for a change and the other at the rather unusual application Microsoft has discovered for screensavers.

On returning from Storage Visions (cue another 30-minute walk, though by now there were rather more tourists), I wrote up a not-from-CES-but-tied-to-it account of today’s big tech news story, Google’s Nexus One phone and its non-availability in Oz. (All praise to the Imperial Palace cleaners: the room’s been done every day so far by 11am, which is very handy.)

This afternoon, I headed into the Venetian/Sands for the CEA stats press conference and CES Unveiled. The CEA numbers are always interesting, and two more stories came out of them for APC: one about challenges Apple will face in the tablet market, and one on consumer indifference to Internet-enabled TVs.

The big shocker? What passes for a press room this year. The CES press room is always crowded at both sites — last year, 4,500 media showed up — but in previous years the CEA has at least tried to make an effort. This year’s combined blogger/media lounge at the Venetian is tiny. It looks like they expect a maximum of 50 people, ever. There’s perhaps a few more power strips than before, but no wireless network, perhaps half-a-dozen PCs for people who didn’t bring their own and a total lack of space. A pathetic effort. The picture shows the entire working area allocated to journos:

Of course, Lifehacker also continued as per usual while all this was going on. Today’s Lifehacker 101 column looked at how to change your in-browser search provider. As well: