First impressions from CEDIA Expo 2008

It's been a frustrating old day at CEDIA Expo at the Excel Centre in London's Docklands. There we were in the heart of a show highlighting some amazingly sophisticated technology, desperate to bring you news of all the latest gadgets and gizmos to enhance your home entertainment system, but initially we were defeated by – technology.

As I settled down in the press room at 10am, eager to post the first story on our lovely new website, I hit a snag – there was no wi-fi connection for my laptop. After much cursing and swearing, I asked the help of CEDIA's PR team, who kindly gave me a log-in and password.

Great, except the local wi-fi network was clearly struggling to cope with the demands placed upon it and was frustratingly slow. Our homepage took a staggering 15 minutes to load, enough time for me to drink several cups of coffee.

Refusing to be defeated, deputy editor Dom Dawes and I decamped to the main foyer where we managed to log on to a (slightly) faster wi-fi network in the local coffee shop. So while Dom went off whizzing around the show taking pictures and gathering stories, I battled on uploading them to our site.

One of the first stories we published was about the new Air remote application for using your iPhone or iPod Touch to control your entire home entertainment system. What a brilliant idea, I thought. If only the technology at technology shows worked as well as the products they're promoting.

A few minutes later a PR contact came up to say hello, cursing that he couldn't pick up his emails on his iPhone – because of the poor wi-fi connection on his stand.

All of which is a roundabout way of apologising if our online news service today was a little slower than we would ideally have liked. But worry not – I'm back home now, with the joy of a 20Mb optical cable broadband connection and my trusty Mac to hand.

So I'll be busy posting lots more news over the next 24 hours to give you a real flavour of what's going on at CEDIA, and Ms Editor-in-Chief Newsome and News Editor Joe Cox will be back at Excel on Thursday to mop up anything I've missed.