Some women at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas have expressed their frustration at the scantily-clad "booth babes" hired by some companies to promote their stalls.

The BBC's Matt Danzico investigates whether this practice is an effective marketing strategy, or merely a reflection on gender relations in technology.

It's connected to Bluetooth through your phone -- acting as a notifier and music play as well as the capability to answer calls and check-up on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Yesterday, one day ahead of the 2012 CES, I saw what’s supposedly the next-generation iPad. I’d show you a picture, but there’s honestly nothing to be seen.

The WF457 washer and dryer set houses an 8-inch touchscreen, is WiFi-enabled and can be controlled from inside or outside of the home via a mobile app. With your smartphone or tablet, you can choose the cycle, duration and set-up notifications on your mobile device once the job is done.

Intel is showing off a reference design of their upcoming Clover Trail platform in a 10 inch tablet form factor.  Clover Trail should be released in the second half of 2012 and they appear to be on track to launch right along side Windows 8.

The front of the booth is not an enticement to gadgets within, it is the gadget.

Ballmer never thought he’d be in this position — not only porting a gaming peripheral to his beloved Windows machines, or even opening it up for commercial development by other software companies, but owning it, taking control of it, and positioning it as a key component in the future of the company.

Considering that a little over a year ago, Microsoft was threatening to sue and/or prosecute anyone who wanted to develop for Kinect on a PC, it’s a remarkable turnaround.

WikiPad has made a splash at CES with its WikiPad:3D — a glasses-free 3D 8-inch tablet running Android 4.0.3.

Look, it's not that there's a theme to how we're feeling today… Anyhow, here's a breakdown of tablets promised and (sometimes) shipped. Note that the article frequently mixes up "shipped" and "sold". So in terms of sales, it's even fewer. We'd forgotten about the Lenovo one, though. Like Lenovo, it seems.

"I try to remember all the products I've talked about that I won't even bother to cover—and that nobody's going to buy. There were some Bluetooth speakers. Or maybe they were WiFi. But there was definitely a helmet cam. And a waterproof phone. And a tablet and an ultrabook and an OLED TV. There was ennui upon ennui upon ennui set in this amazing temple to technology."

Oh, so true. So utterly, utterly true.

Tim Anderson: "One of the features, which failed in the CES demo, is that a PC which is in hibernation can be woken up through wi-fi to deliver your content on demand:

"As long as the main PC is in sleep (standby/hibernation) mode, Acer Always Connect technology can wake it up through Wi-Fi® so media can be retrieved via a mobile device.

"This whole thing would work better if the cloud, rather than the home PC, were the central repository of data. A PC or notebook sitting at home is unreliable. It has a frail hard drive. It might be a laptop on battery power, and the battery might expire. The home broadband connection might fail – and most home connections are much slower uploading to the internet than downloading from it.

"Another question: if you one of the professionals Acer refers to, will you want to put your faith in AcerCloud for showing documents at your business meeting?"

"The smartphone will become the portal to other devices and appliances in the home, which will all work together seamlessly and allow access to whatever type of information you want anywhere in the house. It's already happening, with Wi-Fi being used now to control lights in houses.

"Google's strategy is to move the focus from mobile devices to a more encompassing utilitarian function that shares information and intelligence much like peer-to-peer devices do. 'You want to be able to walk into your house and have all the appliances adjust, know it's you,' Schmidt said. 'A text message goes to the TV because that's your preference' and it all syncs together."

So will we have to choose to live in Android or Apple or Microsoft houses too?

The technology has been programmed to work with an Asteroids-like game and even the Windows 8 Metro interface. I tried it out with the Asteroids game and found it remarkably effective

The company also unveiled a fridge feature called Blast Chiller that can chill a bottle of wine in eight minutes. The refrigerator also features French doors, the largest of its kind on the market.

And not in the mood to vacuum? A new LG robot vacuum cleaner will clean up the house as you kick up your feet and relax on the couch while operating the device via a smartphone.

This camera is a Wi-fi enabled webcam-like device that allows you to turn your gigantic home television into a 720p conferencing station, fully integrated with Skype. This little device also allows you to browse the web and use YouTube on your television with ease. And what’s best? It’s doing so with Android!

BlackBerry OS 7.1, which begins rolling out to BlackBerry smartphones today, includes a variety of new features. BlackBerry Tag allows users with NFC-enabled phones to exchange information by bumping their phones together. Mobile hotspot functionality has been added as well, along with enhanced search capability.

Services such as PayPass—which will allow users to make payments by tapping their credit cards to the device using NFC—and Nuance speech recognition are being incorporated into new Intel partner devices. The goal, said the chip giant, is not only to produce thinner and lighter machines, but laptops that are both fast and capable too, thanks to Intel’s forthcoming Ivy Bridge chipset.

The 55-inch 3D-enabled IPS television is running a skinned version of Android 4.0 ICS, has a webcam built into the bezel, and is powered by 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor.

OLPC’s XO 3.0 tablet is encased in lime green plastic like its laptop counterpart. It has a solar panel cover that can generate four watts of power (which delivers two hours of usage) after charging for an hour. It can also be powered using a hand-cranked power supply. Six minutes of cranking will net you two watts of power, or one hour of usage.