So, this is the time of year when the Hydrapinion team puts on its thinking cap and tries to work out what the new year will bring. In the mobility space, I'm anticipating that 2009 is going to be the year when the developers of handheld devices catch up to Apple.

I'm sure there will be some disagreement but Apple's iPhone is clearly the easiest to use smartphone on the market today. The combination of a large, clear screen, multi-touch gesture-driven interface, decent web browser and, let's not forget, beautiful industrial design has changed the market's expectations of what a smartphone should be. And before I'm accused of being an Apple fan-boy or apologist, the iPhone desperately needs work on its email client (unified Inbox please!), copy/paste (what fool thought text entry without copy/paste was a good idea) and improved battery life (something that plagues many 3G phones).

Two new devices have really caught my eye - the Palm Pre and Google's Android. The Pre seems to have great promise. It wasn't so long ago that I bemoaned palm's lack of innovation. To be honest, I doubted that Palm would see the year out but the Pre, with its new webOS looks to be a game-changer.

Google's G1 platform also shows promise. Given that google's market cachet is at least as strong as Apple's I expect to see lots of Android devices coming through this year. it's nice to see a local, Kogan, leading the way on this front.

Last year, when I was looking ahead to 2008, I mused that battery life was going to continue to disappoint us. Well, I'm pleased, and sad, to say that I was right. However, there's some light on the horizon. Although battery life doesn't seem to be growing in same leaps and bounds a CPU speeds, it's great to see a new technology coming to market. Palm's Touchstone uses inductive charging so there's no need to acvtually plug in to charge. Simply rest the Pre on the Touchstone and it charges up by conducting energy through the casing to the battery. Here's hoping that other devices will introduce this feature and that a single Touchstone-like device will be able to service multiple devices.

Back at the start of 2008 I mentioned that the line between PC, notebook and smartphone would further blur and I think that will continue. There;'s certainly a market for folks wanting a main computer in the office, smartphone while they're out and about and something cheap and lightweight for travelling. Now that services like Dropbox (my favourite file syncing tool) are around, there's not problem even accessing files between devices.

Finally, last year I expected Apple to release a subnotebook/netbook. Well, that didn't happen but it'll happen this year.

Have a great new year folks.