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27th December 2009
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 Apple
 If
you had to name one manufacturer who made an impact in 2009, it
would probably be Apple. Apple's approach has been fundamentally
different from its competitors, with the release of just a single
model, the iPhone
3G S, which was really only an incremental update of the
previous version.
Despite all this, Apple sales are booming and the
end of long-standing carrier exclusivity agreements could well drive
a massive increase in units shipped. A combination of sexy
design, a slick user interface and a colossal range of downloadable
applications make the iPhone very appealing to customers.
The problem for Apple is that consumers demand innovation,
but Apple doesn't like to mess with a winning formula. The iPhone
is particularly weak against the competition when you consider screen
pixel count, multitasking abilities and camera resolution,
so our best bet is that the fourth-generation "iPhone 4"
will address at least some of these issues. Expect the "iPhone
4" to be announced in June 2010 at the annual WWDC
event.
 Nokia
 Squeezed
by Apple in the high-end market, and facing tough competition from
the likes of Samsung for mass-market phones, Nokia faces a difficult 2010
as they struggle to retain their number one spot.
Significant handsets this year include the Nokia
5800 XpressMusic, Nokia
N97, Nokia
N86 8MP and Nokia
6700 Classic. But in our view the most significant handset from
Nokia this year is the Maemo-based Nokia
N900, which at last enables them to break free of the restrictions
of the Symbian OS so that they can compete more effectively with
Apple and Google's Android OS.
Expect to see the Symbian S60 OS in more mid-market
devices as high-end phones increasingly look to Maemo. Nokia have
already indicated that they expect to produce fewer different models
of phone, which should allow the company to focus more on marketing
and promotion.
 Motorola
 One
of the biggest surprises of 2009 is not only that Motorola
is still in business, but that it also has two class-leading Android
smartphones to boast about too.
The Motorola
CLIQ (or DEXT) is quite interesting in hardware terms, but it
is Motorola's MOTOBLUR service that comes with it that is perhaps
more significant. MOTOBLUR allows for seamless synchronisation
of data across devices and locations, and it offers a range of services
that could well challenge Apple. The second interesting handset
is the Motorola
DROID or the MILESTONE
(depending on market) which brings Android 2.0 to customers in a
really high end smartphone that has won considerable praise.
2009 saw very few announcements from Motorola, and
apart from these two handsets there was nothing of significance.
It is clear that Motorola have spent all of their energies on re-aligning
their business, and the future looks much brighter than it did 12
months ago.
 Palm
 Palm
only just survived 2008 with a massive cash injection from investors,
and at the time it wasn't clear why anyone should want to bail them
out. Eventually, Palm revealed the Palm
Pre and Palm
Pixi smartphones running their new and very powerful WebOS operating
system.
WebOS is an excellent platform, and the Pixi and
Pre handsets are pretty good, although there have been criticisms
about build quality. The problem that Palm has is that the handsets
are not selling in sufficient quantity, despite a major media campaign
to shift them. Fundamentally, Palm need to start turning a profit
before the money runs out, and that is looking unlikely.
The long-term future for Palm is not good. As a
standalone company, we feel that it no longer has the resources
to make these handsets a success, and no major manufacturer would
be interested in buying Palm because WebOS won't fit into their
existing strategy. We think it is unlikely that Palm will survive
2010, although we would dearly like to be proven wrong.
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