CES 2009 has finally closed its gates and now it’s time for all kind of statistics and evaluations. And the first metric is the number of people who have visited the CES.

Surprisingly or not, only 110,000 people attended the conference last week in Las Vegas, according to the preliminary estimates released by CEA.
Surprisingly because last year CEA has reported that 141,150 people have visited the CES while in 2007, 143,695 people attended at CES. But the analysts have forecasted that the economic downturn will mean fewer people for trade shows like CES. For this year CEA has estimated that around 130,000 visitors will be attending at CES. However, not only the economic crisis is to blame.

In the past few years, besides Microsoft’s announcement and the resolution in the HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray war, there weren’t too many revolutionary products launched at CES.  Even this year the highlights of the show were just a few. Palm Pre, Sony's flexible OLED display, 3D HDTV, Yahoo's TV Widget and LG's Watch Phone were the stars of this year's show.  

Also in the past two years, Apple’s Macworld has managed to “steal the show” thanks to its gadgets like iPhone or MacBook Air.  That’s why bringing Apple onboard as it was rumored maybe is not such bad idea after all.

And Apple could benefit also from attending at CES, as a new step of its transformation into a company that is known not only for its Macs, but also for consumer gadgets like iPod Touch, Apple TV and so on.

Apple’s officials has announced that this year’s Macworld was the last for them and while nothing is confirmed it won’t be a big surprise to see Apple at CES next year.

However, according to the data released last week, the consumer electronics industry is projected to generate $171 billion in U.S. shipment revenues in 2009 and the fact that there were 20,000 new products and 300 new exhibitors is also a good sign.