Happy New Year from Las Vegas!

Andy Castonguay, Dmitriy Molchanov, and I will be covering the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show all week from this city in the desert, trying to keep up with the tsunami of news and announcements from the show. You can follow our updates here at blogs.yankeegroup.com. If you want a more real-time set of updates, you can follow me on Twitter at @cdhowe or check Yankee Group tweets at #YankeeGroup.

On the agenda today is the “pre-show” activity when most companies try to beat the rush of press releases through the rest of the week. Notable today in the pre-dawn hours was an announcement of D-Link’s Boxee Box for streaming Internet audio and video to your TV. Seemlingly purpose-built to cause heartburn for cable TV executives, it’s the harbinger of many more Internet TV boxes to be showcased this week. That said, the idea that you can now buy an off-the-shelf device that for Boxee is a big deal; heretofore, consumers have had to install their own software on a PC or Apple TV.

All that said, two big stories today are our of Silicon Valley instead of Las Vegas. Specifically,

• Google announces its Nexus One phone this morning. Google will be hosting a press conference in Mountain View today to provide first looks and details on its HTC-built, Android-powered Nexus One mobile phone. Google employees received their own Nexus One’s as holiday gifts at the end of the year, but today will be the first time the general public gets an official look at the specifications and terms of sales. My view of the Nexus One is that it is an buying alternative for people who want an iPhone experience, but don’t want to buy into the Apple business model or the AT&T network. And Google does appear willing to sell it unlocked, thereby teasing us with the possibility that it is network neutral phone.
• Apple is building buzz toward its as-yet-unannounced tablet.. Apple announced today that iPhone and iPod touch users have now downloaded a total of 3 billion apps from the iTunes App Store. That totals more than 10.2 million downloads per day. This momentum is fueling a media frenzy headlined by the Wall Street Journal regarding Apple’s likely announcement of a tablet computer on January 27 in San Francisco. Stay tuned for more on that one; there are very few actual facts available as of yet. However, this story could become a CES show-stealer equivalent to Apple’s iPhone announcement in 2007 if some facts do get out.

Look for more info as we get our badges and the show really gets going.