This week the Consumer Electronics Show is taking place in Las Vegas.

Every technology journalist who can persuade an editor to pay the air fare is there playing with cool gadgets, and trying to figure out which technologies are going to change the way we live.

The BBC's Alfred Hermida is one of the lucky ones.

I'm stuck in Cambridge trying to make sense of the many dispatches being written in Las Vegas hotel rooms by tired correspondents overwhelmed by the goodies on display, he gets to wander the halls and play with the toys - sorry, I mean 'consumer electronic devices'.

Some of the new products really are toys, like Sony's advanced version of its Aibo robot dog.

Wrist watch

Others are headline-grabbing and designed to appeal to the geek in all of us.

My friend Simon, for example, is already salivating over Bill Gates announcement of a Microsoft-enabled watch that can receive text messages and other broadcast information like weather reports or traffic details.

The watch, along with some networked fridge magnets, is part of a new program, called SPOT, or 'smart personal object technology' that Microsoft has created.

It has certainly managed to attract press attention, but behind the hype it is actually just another example of Microsoft's ability to follow trends rather than lead them.

This all sounds very exciting, but in fact it's just clueless

The idea of putting processing capacity into everyday objects has been around for years - there are embedded systems in most domestic appliances already, and modern cars are basically computer-controlled engines with a wheel on each corner.

All that has changed is that wireless networking, whether third-generation phones, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, has finally reached the point where these embedded systems can be online.

Fear factor

Despite this Microsoft is initially planning to use the rather low-tech solution of sending the information over FM radio channels.

Gadget lovers are gathering in Vegas

This means that the SPOT watches and fridge magnets will only be able to receive information, raising the interesting point that if you're going to need your phone or PDA to respond to any incoming data, why bother with the watch?

The answer, of course, is that this sort of pre-announcement of superficially functional technology is Microsoft's preferred way of sowing doubt and confusion in the minds of consumers, resellers and the competition.

If Microsoft is moving into smart watches then anyone else thinking of doing something similar is going to find it hard indeed to get venture capital or executive approval for their truly innovative project in the same area.

Top set bucks

Another superficially interesting announcement came from one of Microsoft's rivals, Sony.

In his CES talk Sony Chief Operating Officer Kunitake Ando argued that the television is going to be 'reborn as an always on and connected device' which will be preferred to the computer screen as a place to watch movies or programming, with a sound system to match.

This all sounds very exciting, but in fact it's just clueless. I don't think that Sony, or anyone else, has any idea about what we might want to do with a 'connected' TV or how an 'always on' TV would fit into people's lives.

Bill Gates and a smart watch

Apart from games shows and gambling, interactive television has failed to excite viewers, and the distinction between 'lean forward' screens on computers and 'lean back' screens on TVs seems as real as ever.

Sony may want a future in which the reborn TV sits at the centre of an interactive, multimedia home entertainment network, but this strikes me as more wishful thinking than perceptive analysis.

After all, the company has movies and music it wants to sell, and so its idea of tomorrow's technology will be biased by its desire to continue doing this profitably.

Perhaps the real value of CES and other trade shows is that it allows us to compare the digital dreams of many different companies, each with their own interests to promote and their own markets to protect - and we get to see just how unimaginative most of their ideas really are.