martphones -- will we someday call them simply "phones," just as many people now assume a "phone" means a mobile device? -- led the headlines throughout 2009. They earned that prominence with hardware and software upgrades that advanced their capabilities and gave mobile users fewer reasons to pack a laptop on their next trip.
Apple's iPhone was at the center of this story, but not always for reasons Apple might appreciate. Its new iPhone 3GS brought notable advances from last year's iPhone 3G and helped push the iPhone past Microsoft's aging Windows Mobile in market share, but its capricious oversight of the iPhone's App Store and AT&T Wireless's erratic reliability had some iPhone users and developers seething.
And this year, competitors had some compelling answers to the iPhone. Google's Android software finally broke out of its T-Mobile beachhead with the arrival of Android devices on Sprint and Verizon in the fall; Verizon's Droid was the most impressive Android phone yet, with its brilliant Google Maps navigation program.
Smartphone programmers took note. By the end of the year, some 16,000 programs were available for Android. That's far fewer than the 100,000 programs available for the iPhone, but some of the more creative applications on phones -- for instance, "augmented reality" programs like Layar -- have begun showing up on Android first.
Another iPhone rival emerged in the summer when Palm shipped its Pre smartphone, a sleek, Web-savvy creation that owed nothing to its obsolete Treo and Centro devices and the even older software on them. If Palm can attract more developers to the Pre's webOS operating system -- a non-trivial "if" -- smartphone users should have an excellent choice of phones in 2010.
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