And what of Nokia? The once dominant player in the mobile phone market has struggled to keep up with the competition. The main difficulty for Nokia has been its insistence on using Symbian to drive its hardware, while the likes of Android and iOS stole the ball. Hell, even Windows Mobile has leapfrogged Symbian on pretty much every relevant level.
However, despite being slightly hamstrung by its OS, Nokia has still managed to produce some pretty good handsets recently. The range topping N8 is a surprisingly good bit of kit, and the latest Symbian^3 OS is a huge improvement over previous versions.
However, Symbian^3 is quirky at best, and still way behind the competition when it comes to intuitive ease of use. But as with Microsoft, we're wary of ever writing Nokia off, so we're expecting some updates to Symbian^3 in 2011, coupled with new hardware to exploit the OS to its full potential.
Whether Nokia will come up with a true competitor to the iPhone or a high-end Android handset remains to be seen, but deep down, we kind of hope it does.
With the Consumer Electronics Show in January and Mobile World Congress in February, we're expecting some big announcements in the next couple of months. We'll be attending both shows, and covering all the big launches in the mobile arena.