1st place: Nokia
It's become a sport to bash Nokia, and we could easily come up with several reasons ourselves. Most of them would no longer be valid though, as the Finnish giant has probably seen one of its best years in a long time in 2009. There are especially six Nokia phones our audience have paid attention to this year: The N95 8GB NAM, N97, N900, E71x, Surge and 5310. These phones represent the company's hottest phones in the mid- and high-end market. With Nokia taking new steps towards delivering top-notch mobile solutions across the range of user types as we speak, this company will also be one of the most interesting to follow moving forward.
2nd place: RIM
Research In Motion is a tough nut to crack, no doubt about it. On one hand, the company needs to maintain its corporate client base with top-notch messaging solutions, and on the other hand, it's been forced to react to new user expectations in multimedia and interface offerings. We've yet to see the really juicy stuff of the latter. Nevertheless, the BlackBerry Tour, Bold, Storm and Curve lineups have ensured that Research In Motion is stronger than ever, which should only make it easier for the company to come up with even better solutions in the future.
3rd place: Apple
Apple's iPhone and iPod touch success is already well-documented, and whatever Apple is currently working on to hold on to all its newfound iPhone and iPod touch lovers, we're sure it'll be sufficient to maintain this concept's interest among buyers. Apple hasn't been as innovative as one would imagine, but their ability to get people to understand and buy what they're offering in the first place can only be said to be admirable. It's also a fact that brand value is as important in the mobile market as in any other market, and when it comes to building brand awareness, nobody comes close to Apple.
4th place: Samsung
It's not long ago you knew what you'd get when buying a Samsung phone, something thin and cheap that wouldn't work exactly the way you wanted it to. In 2009 we've seen several attempts around the world at making Samsung phones more about offering high-end specifications. Recently, the company also announced that a new beginning for its software is on the horizon. Clearly, that's the worst thing that can happen for all the competitors, and we bet many of them are worried about the outcome. That said, there's simply too many hot Samsung phones to name them all here, heck, we might even not have covered them all. We guess that says it all about Samsung in 2009.
5th place: HTC, Palm and Motorola
2009 has been the first real year for HTC as a standalone brand, and the Touch Pro2 and Hero sales numbers have proved that it'll not be easy for HTC to compete with the big brands above. However, the company has a vision, which combined with the unique ability to work with others, will likely lead to bigger things down the road.
Will Palm still be around at the end of the year? It was a viable question to ask earlier this year, and Palm is still around. From a brand perspective, Palm is well-known among the smartphone crowd, but from a sales perspective, it's slimmer than ever though. We've seen people complaining about not being able to try out WebOS in stores this year, and that's been Palm in a nutshell in 2009: Promising product strategy with the introduction of the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, but questionable sales strategy. Verizon Wireless seems to have a plan for Palm in 2010 though.
A lot of well-performing Motorola phones disappeared from store shelves in 2009, a clear sign of the new era in the mobile world: State-of-the-art messaging, social networking, Widgets and data plan requirements. If you've failed to deliver in that regard in 2009, you'd better have savings to live on in 2010, or what? The Motorola Droid / Milestone came late but well though, and Motorola promises a ton of similar phones in 2010. It's still too early to say whether Motorola will succeed with their new Android effort, but when you team up with Google, Verizon Wireless and major carriers around the world to turn things around, it kind of just has to work out one way or another.
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