Take down the bunting, dismantle the booths and unchain the journalists, because the Consumer Electronics Show is over for another year.

For anybody unaware of CES, it’s an annual conference held in Las Vegas in which the industry gathers en masse to pat itself on the back in a series of self-congratulatory keynotes, and show off its new product lines for the forthcoming year. Given the glitz and sheer, sweaty effort that goes into creating CES, it almost seems counter intuitive to suggest that it was a muted affair, but beneath the bragging everybody was nervous. Crowds were a staggering 31,000 lower than last year. Shuttle buses sat empty, and lines of taxis sat waiting for people who would never come. Though the big boys’ stalls still got plenty of interest, drifting even slightly away from the centre hall meant things got very lonely, very quickly.

Product announcements were plenty, but internet-enabled televisions dominated the vast majority and the first morning in particular ended up feeling like a bad joke as manufacturer after manufacturer rolled out brighter tellies with Yahoo widgets installed. The reason is self evident. There’s a credit crunch and televisions sell. Safety first, as they say.

Journalists trudged away from these sessions muttering curses and praying for Ballmer to start a riot with his first CES keynote, a position he inherited from Bill Gates. Again though, the mood of the place seemed catching. Instead of the bellowing and name calling we were hoping for, Ballmer came across as unusually timid, content to show a series of flashy videos and big up the forthcoming Windows 7, tacitly damning Vista in the meantime.

Indeed the Microsoft booth, for all its sparkle, offered much the same thing. A series of Windows 7 demonstrations, orbited by reps offering prepared sound bites. Any mention of online office, Zune or anything faintly off the itinery resulted in a blank look and a hurried exit through the nearest door as soon as your back was turned. In terms of booths, Samsung easily took the prize, if only for sheer “stuff the credit crunch” glamour. Its booth was the size of a game park and stuffed with everything Samsung could comfortably fit on a container ship.

The most interesting moment, for me personally, was probably the LG phone watch, which strikes me in ambition and design as a modern-day Casio digital watch. Undoubtedly cumbersome and very probably completely redundant in the real world, it nonetheless remained a rarity throughout the show and everybody who saw it walked away with a smile on their face, and an opinion.

If the attendance number is to rise again in the coming years, we’ll almost certainly need to see more manufacturers pulling the same trick.

For all our coverage from this year’s CES click here.