HE2004 in San Francisco this year

I would like to get other people's opinion on what they think this show will be like this year. I went last year and had a good time. This year, things are different. This will be the second show this year, not counting CES. It costs quite a bit of money for each vendor to put this together, and since it is so close to CES this year, I'm just wondering if a lot of vendors will skip this altogether or scale back to ramp up for CES.