Considering the time and expense involved, the biggest story in technology this year could have been the largely successful transition to digital television that wrapped up in June. But 2009’s most significant tech developments took place on much smaller screens. Smartphones led the headlines throughout 2009 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 centre 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 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 year’s end, 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, smartphone users should have an excellent choice of phones in 2010.
The market for full-fledged, “real” computers was less interesting in 2009. Desktop machines continued to lose market share to laptops, which brought no noteworthy innovations in hardware design.
Microsoft may have finally made its penance for Windows Vista by shipping the much-improved Windows 7 — but the user-hostile process involved in upgrading from Windows XP to 7, combined with PC manufacturers’ continued brain-dead taste in bundled software, will hold back 7 a bit.
For PC users not looking to buy a new computer, Microsoft’s most-welcome release of the year was not 7 but its free, nag-free Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus programme, an overdue challenge to the intrusive, irritating products of incumbent security-software vendors.
Apple’s new Mac OS X Snow Leopard didn’t offer as many concrete benefits as Windows 7, but the Mac market only kept growing in 2009, hitting 12 percent of the consumer market in one study. You can’t credit Apple alone for that shift. The accelerating movement of consumer software from traditional, disk-based programs to Web-hosted options, most free, steadily eroded the “but I can’t run my old programs on a Mac” objection. Microsoft announced that the next release of its Office productivity software would include a free, ad-supported Web version.
©The Washington Post