I spent today wandering around the convention floor at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. While Comdex has suffered a painful decline in relevance and attendance (I frankly don't know which came first), CES remains a vibrant show. Vendors ranging from Sony to Pentax to Monster Cable share the convention floor with less obvious demonstrators like the United States Post Office. While it is not quite the spectacle of E3, some rooms certainly give it a sonic run for its money.

As we arrived at CES this morning, there were a crew of men and women dressed in tuxedos and black dresses. Maybe 20 strong, they stood silently in formation, two by two, all wearing sun glasses that obscured their eyes. It was entirely unclear what purpose they served. The woman beside me in line speculated that they were an acapella group. Sadly, they did not sing. Rather, shortly after we arrived, for no particular reason, at no particular prompting, and delivering no particular message, the men and women in black left.

But that was not the last the we would see of them. Some time later that afternoon, as we searched the floor for Pentax to check out the new Optio S4 (the incredibly cool little digital camera now available in 4 megapixels), our path was blocked by a parade of the same sunglassed people, but this time they were delivering a one word message — “bluetooth.” They said nothing about bluetooth. They spoke no slogans. They didn’t even wear wireless headsets. They simply croaked “bluetooth” “bluetooth” “bluetooth.” Their intoning of the word “bluetooth” was not even as purposeful as those awful Aflac commercials. The third time we crossed paths with the bluetooth brigade we amused ourselves by saying “WiFi” back at them. They were not amused. Frankly, the didn’t have a clue what we were talking about. And it suddenly struck us . . . again . . . that we were serious geeks.

Putting aside the seemingly random bluetooth parade (which turned out to be “Operation Blueshock,” a publicity stunt by the Bluetooth SIG), bluetooth actually had a surprisingly large presence at CES. Numerous companies were showing bluetooth enabled products. There were bluetooth headsets. Bluetooth mice. Bluetooth headphones. Bluetooth keyboards. Even a couple different companies demonstrating wireless speakers using bluetooth. While there is no question that many of these devices have come a long way since the early days of bluetooth (some are even great now, which could certainly not be said a year ago), the reality is that most of these products could just as easily utilize IR or FM, rather than bluetooth. And those that couldn’t would be better off using WiFi. So despite the bluetooth buzz at CES, I remain a skeptic. Wireless is the present and the future. But I do not believe that bluetooth is here to stay.