2009 in review: The year in smartphones

2009: The year of the smartphone

A look back over the mobile announcements of last year shows that 2009 can justifiably be labelled 'the year of the smartphone', as a staggering number of new handsets either came to market, or have at least been unveiled during the past 12 months.

And the excitement was not limited solely to devices, as 2009 also saw the emergence of several new platforms aiming to grab a slice of market share from the established players such as Symbian, Windows Mobile and RIM's BlackBerry OS.

While Google's Android platform appeared in 2008, the number of handsets using it turned from a trickle into a flood last year, while Palm staged a comeback with its all-new WebOS.

Thanks to Apple's iPhone, gesture-driven touch-screens became almost a standard feature of smartphones this year, joining HSDPA, Wi-Fi and GPS, while screens themselves became bigger and boasted higher resolutions.

Another major development was the app store. Envious of Apple's success with its online presence for downloading software direct to its iPhone, various vendors and operators almost fell over themselves to introduce their own versions, often backed by initiatives and incentives designed to attract developer support.

Here we have rounded up a choice selection of reviews from 2009, along with a brief look ahead to 2010.

Palm Pre
Palm kicked off 2009 by announcing its Pre smartphone at CES in Las Vegas in January, although the handset itself was not available until June in the US, and October in the UK.

The Pre introduced Palm's WebOS, a new platform centred on the web and the user's personal data, and was widely tipped as a serious rival for Apple's iPhone. Like that device, the Pre has a high resolution touch-screen, but also has a slide-out Qwerty keyboard that makes messaging easier than on its rival.

Our review of the Pre was favourable, but whether Palm can attract enough developers to its platform in the long term remains to be seen.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
January also saw Nokia's first touch-screen phone, the 5800, hit the UK market. This handset was touted as the phone giant's answer to Apple's iPhone, a phrase that has since become tiresome through being applied to almost every new touch-screen device.

The device, which offered owners a year's unlimited downloads from Nokia's music store, saw early success with brisk UK sales following its availability, although the US version ran into some technical glitches. Our reviewer concluded that the device was a good choice for buyers used to Nokia's S60 user interface.

HTC Magic
Unveiled in February at the Mobile World Congress show, the HTC Magic was the second handset to ship with Google's Android platform, following the T-Mobile G1 in late 2008.

The Magic is slimmer and lighter than its predecessor, but lacks a keyboard and so relies mostly on its touch-screen for input. However, the Android platform with its easy access to Google services such as Google Mail, and easy customisation, went down well with our reviewer.

Nokia E75
Nokia's E75, which launched in May, was the first device from the company to feature a slide-out Qwerty keyboard. It also introduced a new email user interface, and was aimed at business professionals, coming with the Quickoffice application suite and able to link with Microsoft Exchange mail servers.

Apple iPhone 3GS
Apple's popular iPhone has had a huge impact on the smartphone market since the original model launched, causing multi-touch screens and more intuitive user interfaces to become standard features.

The arrival of the iPhone 3GS in June ushered in an updated operating system with improved performance, support for faster 3G network downloads and a boost in built-in storage to 16GB or 32GB.

However, despite these improvements, our conclusion was that the new iPhone was somewhat pricey, and that consumers might want to look around at alternatives before shelling out for one.