Since the late sixties, the great and the good of the consumer electronics world have met up for the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES , in order to show off their stuff. It's where you'll find the tech that's set to dominate the next 12 months, it's where you'll see the trends that will shape everything from the way you work to the things you watch on TV, and it's where you'll find completely incomprehensible bits of kit that someone, somewhere, must have thought a good idea. What you won't find at CES is Apple or Google, two firms who seem rather keen on spoiling the fun for everybody else. It's not that Apple doesn't go, or that Google doesn't go, although they don't. It's that they time their own big announcements in such a way that they annoy everybody who does. 2007's announcement of the iPhone overshadowed that year's CES, and Google seems to be up to the same thing this year by unveiling its Nexus One phone on the eve of CES 2010. This year, Apple's at it again without officially doing anything: the steady drip, drip, drip of Tablet information, including a suspiciously well-timed story in today's Wall Street Journal , looks awfully like an orchestrated attempt to overshadow Google's attempt to overshadow CES. It's all a bit playground, isn't it? The thing is, neither Google nor Apple needs to do this. It's not as if they're fledgling firms who can't get any attention, obscure innovators who can't persuade the press to cover them
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