Mobile Entertainment

The show was broadcast live, with often hilarious consequences as the latest fangled gadget exploded in the presenter's face during a demo.

One gets a Tomorrow's World feeling watching things unfold at the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Vegas this week.

It's one of those events to which the big news channels send their reporters with a single remit - to come back with the wackiest stories they possibly can for the 'and finally' slot on the Nine O'Clock News.

Cue reporters trying to sit straight faced as Bill Gates tells them that in five years time 'tens of millions' of people will be accessing content at home through a digital coffee table that looks kind of like one of those old Pac-Man arcade machines.

It's easy to mock though, and Gates said some interesting stuff about mobile, riffing on what he called 'natural interfaces', referencing the iPhone and Nintendo Wii in more than interview.

We all know about the iPhone touchscreen, but it was another company - Sony Ericsson - that picked up the Wii concept and ran with it. The company used CES to launch its new W760 Walkman phone, which supports motion-sensing gaming.

It's a feature also present in the existing K850i - try playing motion sensor Marble Madness on the train and watch as people slowly move away from you.

Elsewhere, mobile TV was very much on the CES agenda, with Samsung following LG by announcing a new broadcast solution - A-VSB - for the US market.

So that means there's at least nine broadcast mobile TV standards vying for space around the world - A-VSB, DVB-H, MediaFLO, DMB, CMMB, DAB-IP, ISDB-T, MBMS and LG's MPH. I bet there's still nothing on though.

Perhaps the most interesting trend-pointer to come out of CES was a wave of 'ultra mobile' PC (UMPC) announcements. UMPCs came in for a lot of flak when they first emerged 18 months ago - they seemed a little redundant so soon after smartphones had put a stake through the heart of the PDA.

But the fact is laptops are getting smaller, mobiles are getting more and more apps. At some point the two going to meet and there'll be a huge rift in the space-time continuum. A colleague already uses her tiny Asus Eee laptop (now with Wimax!) as a surrogate 'mobile' phone when in wi-fi coverage due to its Skype capabilities.

The Sony PSP is going the same way with Skype, and it's already optimised for multimedia and will soon be offering downloads from a wireless portal.

There's an expanding universe for 'mobile' entertainment out there. Let's hope it doesn't blow up in our faces.