Wirefly, the Internet’s leading online retailer of cell phones, reported its top 10 sellers for the year. Samsung had three representatives—the Impression, which was the number one bestseller, the Mythic, and the Highlight (Fig. 2). BlackBerry also did well with its Bold 9700, Curve 8330, and Curve 8900.

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The Motorola Droid was number four and brought many new subscribers to Verizon in competition with the iPhone. It is a fitting rival. The LG enV3 and Chocolate Touch were also on the list, as well as HTC’s Hero based on Google’s Android. Nokia’s N900 was a big hit too, just not in the U.S.

The Samsung Impression was Wirefly’s top selling phone in 2009.

Let’s not forget the phone that caused the most excitement, the Google Nexus One. It does everything the iPhone does, and it has a cool user interface. It’s hard to say how it will fare, though it’s surely a great iPhone competitor. Garmin Asus also will introduce its G60 Android nuviphone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month. It’s a 3G touchscreen phone like all the others with a camera, Web browsing, and Gmail. But its key feature is Garmin’s superior GPS navigation software. The phone focuses on navigation and local search of people, restaurants, hotels, and other locations of interest.

Other smart phones will come along this year. It looks like the smart phone is quickly replacing the so-called mid-range feature phone. Pretty soon we will just have the low-end phones and the smart phones, but even the low-end phones will do e-mail and texting and have a camera. What else do you really need these days if you’re not a road warrior? I predict that the iPhone will continue to be the top seller and the handset to beat. It is a great product, and Apple’s cachet and more than 100,000 apps will keep it in first place for the time being.

Speaking of apps, asknet Inc. recently surveyed smart-phone users in Boston and San Francisco about apps on their cell phones. About 45% of users have never bought an app, 38% were frustrated by the high cost of the apps, and 29% said they were afraid to enter their credit card number into a cell phone. The apps most likely to be downloaded are music and business-related software—so much for all the hype about apps.

More Mobile Movements

The other big trend was the surprising netbook spurt. Laptop manufacturers were horrified at first that they would lose business, but all of them joined the fray and profited. Recent market data indicates that the netbook movement is flattening out at about 11% of the overall laptop business. It’s a great new mobile niche.