As the year starts to draw to a close, we thought we’d look back at significant moments in the mobile world during 2008. Ponderings where you can sit down with your grand children one day and say ‘yes, I was there when it happened’, or if you’re too senile by then, they can tell you all about and you can call them liars.

Either way, the following is a recap and in no particular order of occurrence, or importance on what or how they happened in the year of our Lord two thousand and eight.

If there happens to be anything you think we’re missing or paid little or no attention to, please feel free to drop a comment in at the base of this.

The QWERTY keyboard based Smartphones saw a huge resurgence in 2008. With the ‘normal’ near PC layout design of the HTC Touch Pro, Xperia X1, HTC S740 all with their own worth and merits being fairly popular. Along with likes of the keyboard-moulded-around-handsets gaining ground with the BlackBerry Bold, Curve 8900, Nokia E71 and soon to be seen E63.

No one can ignore how well the touch screen phones have done, especially with the likes of the iPhone. Earlier on in the year we saw the 16GB version of the 2G arrive on the scene. Following on from that model the 3G version later on in 2008; although it must have irked some people that it came in so cheap as compared to the 2G version a year earlier. iRage must have been the name for that symptom surely?

HTC had a good year with their Touch Diamond being their best selling handset to date. Just to build on that success, they built the world’s first Google Android powered phone in the G1. Even more kudos has to go to them, for building Sony Ericsson’s first ever Windows Mobile phone with the Xperia X1. They certainly came out of their shell, after really only being known as makers of the SVP Orange handsets.

BlackBerry broke form with two phones in 2008. They launched their first flip mobile with the Pearl Flip 8220, which seemed to be overshadowed by their other imminent release. This was obviously the Storm, the joint venture with Vodafone and Verizon for a full touch screen handset – minus the customary keyboard that everyone associates with RIM devices. They really didn’t do anything by halves on that phone, did they?

2008 was supposed to herald in the next gen of wireless connectivity, when we really only heard some murmurings from a few companies. HTC did unveil the very first ever WiMAX mobile phone towards the end of the year, but only in Russia. Whilst others made a little noise over LTE, but not loud enough in our opinion – here’s hoping 2009 brings better news.

Facebook according to all reports had the largest jump in usage on social networking sites and on mobiles. Not only that, but for all intents and purposes it had its own mobile design for it on 3, by 3. The INQ 1 has only been with us for a while, but to all accounts it’s taken the network by storm and looks to be a success. More handsets in the INQ linage are due in 2009, with the rumour of a QWERTY keyboard/Smartphone version being on the horizon.

Application stores had a great success in 2008, all building on from the growth of the iTunes Apple store for the iPhone and iTouch devices. Google announced their own this year for their own OS based handsets, which we’re promised to see more of too. Their Android Market store has yet to gain the momentum of Apple’s, but there’s always hope for the future. BlackBerry also announced their own take on this, as did Palm with the Software Store. 2009 could be the year of the Widget, who knows?

The OS wars heated up, with Google’s Android being shown off at Mobile World Congress on a few Vanilla handsets and then later on arriving on the HTC/T-Mobile G1. Windows Mobile was launched on April Fool’s Day at the Comedy Store in London , and we’re still all waiting for the punch line. This has been plagued with foibles and troubles since turning up, so much so that their own product manager uses cooked ROMs from the xda-developers site to correct all its faults.

Then there was the Nokia £209million acquisition of Symbian, with the promise to turn that platform into an open source OS. Clearly a gut reaction to Google’s Android, although a risky one at that. Hopefully this will open up the mobile phone market to great potential in much richer features, greater competition amongst them all to improve the platforms that we have around today, whilst keeping the costs low for phones.

Music content on mobiles came in to play in 2008. The PlayNow content for Sony Ericsson had a huge influx of tracks earlier on in the year, which must have boosted the Walkman mobile sales in some shape or form. Nokia stepped on to the dance floor with Sony BMG offering up their catalogue, for the Nokia Music Store. New handsets also came out from them with the offer of free unlimited music for a year, on their ‘Comes With Music’ brand. This must have upset the Apple cart with their iTunes.

The netbooks all had a good year too. DELL, MSI, Lenovo, Acer, Samsung and HP all jumped on the Asus bandwagon during 2008. When they became of interest to us is when they started to have imbedded 3G functionality and the likes of Orange bundling in imbedded SIM cards and offering up contracts for the devices – making them a truly mobile computing device.

Camera phones reached the lofty heights of 8 megapixels this year, or 8.1 if you really want to be pedantic and stand out, Sony Ericsson. Samsung and LG were also at the party, in both regular models and touch screen varieties. Notably absent from the bash were Nokia, who seemed happy with their 5MP offerings. Although a possible leaked roadmap shows off they are still planning an 8MP handset.

In closing, we’re just happy that CERN didn’t turn the world into the opening moments of the film 2001 with their Large Hadron Collider. Well done CERN! No one really wants to go back to being cavemen anyway, protruding foreheads were so last year.

Let’s look forward now to 2009, with more Android handsets, larger capacity on phones, 4G mobiles and flying cars too.

Sling Media snuck out today via a blog post on their community site a new update to their SlingPlayer for Windows Mobile devices.

The main reason for the release is new found support for higher resolution screens. These new formats coming along in the form of display levels at 800 x 480, 640 x 480, 400 x 240 and 320 x 320.

All of which mean a new range of handsets can now have SlingPlayer rolled out on them, totalling 15 new mobiles altogether and just before Christmas too.

The new models are as follows, with their regions too: Palm Treo 800w (US), Sony Ericsson X1 (US & UK), Palm Treo Pro (US & UK), HTC Touch Diamond (US), HTC Touch Pro (US), Samsung Saga (US), Samsung Omnia (US), LG Incite (US & UK), Samsung Epix (US & UK), HP iPAQ 910 (US & UK), Pantech Duo (US) and the Samsung ACE (US).

The HTC Touch HD should also work with this release, as it shares the same resolution but nothing is guaranteed.

SlingPlayer is gratis on a months trial, with a subsequent nominal fee of £19.99 then afterwards. It has support for 3G and WIFI, with an unofficial compatibility for EDGE handsets.

Sling Media have also updated the software for portrait and landscape mode switching, roaming notifications, better digital channel support numbers and TV logos too.

Download the software if you wish to swing from the following links –

US: http://downloads.slingmedia.com/go/slingbox-mobile-us

UK: http://downloads.slingmedia.com/go/slingbox-mobile-uk

Canada: http://downloads.slingmedia.com/go/slingbox-mobile-ca

We wonder if the X1 could have panel integration with SlingPlayer?

Sony Ericsson has just released a bunch of new panels for the Xperia X1 handset, just in time for it to arrive in the Americas.

These new additions to the phone’s UI act much the same way as many common place widgets do on other mobiles.

Besides a Facebook panel, they’ve also made public a Windows Live and Dashwire module too. Just to round off the new additions and it also saves launching just the one; obviously the announcement was all about the Facebook panel anyway.

The Dashwire pan-widget-el seems a nice bolt on and could complement the phone nicely. It’s from the site that offers syncing of a mobile’s content to its portal over the air. This is all with a view to share media on a range of social networking sites, plus having other funky features too.

Its Facebook module extends the basic abilities of m.facebook.com and x.facebook.com, by meeting half way towards the functions of the actual site. All this without killing your precious precious data allowance and bandwidth.

From a play around with the Windows Live panel, it also comes somewhere between the actual fully blown site and the lite mobile version. There’s a promise that other features of the Windows Live experience will be included later on, although we’re unsure if this will be updated over the air or with a new panel.

We were told by SE that they will be offering more panels within time for the handset, be on the lookout for more.

In the mean time, feel free to download and try these ones out here

Looks like you can order it now from Vodafone UK… any takers?

The fresh round of leaked photos of the device we’ve all been calling the ‘Tube’ which first made it’s fleeting public appearance in that Batman movie has got everyone (including the usually-calm Financial Times on Tuesday) talking about Nokia’s new ‘smartphone’.  Some of the more breathless coverage is already referring to it in the same league as T-Mobile’s Google-powered G1 and the Xperia X1, in ‘three new iPhone killer’ terms.

But look at it [photo credit: MobileCruch].

Nokia are singing to their own hymn sheet here.  Sure, it will be the first ever S60 Touch device, but it’s on a 5xxx-series music phone and that’s all it will be.  When the music and video party-tricks are done reviewers expecting ‘the next big thing’ are going to left scratching their backsides wondering what to write about next.

It’s not an N-series device – the camera will be so-so and the processor won’t be up to the toughest jobs -  and it certainly won’t have the enhanced PIM features of recent E-series devices… The most recently released E71 and E66 didn’t event make it to the expected FP2 release of S60 3rd edition in the interests of platform stability (probably wise given the ‘missing VoIP stack‘ issues with the N96 / N78).

Why aren’t Nokia going hell-for-leather and slapping this new S60 edition in a N-series ‘king of the smartphones’ unit?  Well, I think they probably will and fairly soon too, but right now either the need to focus on ‘comes with music‘ in the run up to Christmas or the desire to knock a few rough edges off this young interface (or both) means it’s going in a music phone.

It might be good, but flagship smartphone it won’t be.

Enough has already been speculated and said about the phone, the first among the company’s Sub-Brand Xperiaâ„¢. The Xperiaâ„¢ X1 features a three-inch wide touchscreen and is powered by Windows Mobile. The phone features a full QWERTY keyboard and customisable panels for easy accessibility. 

The handset will be launched in UK and will initially be available only in the countries of Sweden, Germany along with the UK. The phone is expected to hit other markets in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America in the fourth quarter of the year. Here’s the list of the probable countries.

APAC

• Indonesia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam

Western Europe

• Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal

Central Europe

• Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic

Middle East

• UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait

Africa

• South Africa

Latin America

• Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia

Netbooks were very much in evidence – being supplied free with the various subscription 3G data packages.  In addition to the existing range including some Eee models from Asus, an Acer Aspire One and an Advent 4211 a new model from Fujitsu was on show.  Spec wise there was little separate it from the pack but styling and finish were impressive… Everyone agreed there would be a ‘bloodbath’ in this sector in the next few months with Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba all also due to announce products.

The Samsung stand was one of the best with the Omnia – a Windows Mobile 6.1 iPhone-a-like (that’s mine on the right of it for comparison) – launching today and the very impressive i8510 – one of Samsung’s first Symbian handsets – also on show.  The i8510 give Nokia’s best a run for their money – expect to hear more on this… my wallet is itching!  I’ve already got Ewan excited see here.

Next up was Nokia announcing an exclusive (until Christmas) white 5310 handset via CPW for the launch of their ‘Comes with Music‘ offering which is first to launch in the UK.  This gives a code for unlimited downloads from the Nokia music store which is very cool.  Even better is the fact you can keep the tracks after your year-long free subscription expires, but some of the answers about transfers to upgraded handsets and renewing subscriptions were worryingly vague – Nokia best have some good answers before those years start expiring!  Also on show were a number of the newer handsets including the N96 which, in my opinion, is looking lamer and lamer everyday as a flagship model (sorry Nokia).

Next up were our new best friends at SonyEricsson (the same chap in fact) who had his X1 out again and couldn’t answer any of the hard questions about when it would actually be released.  He did say some nice things about the show though so there is some hope for them

The new Jawbone headset we reviewed a few months back is now available in gun-metal grey and gold…. Meh.

Motorola had their Z10 out which impresses with its unusual form factor and video playback if nothing else, but also had their ‘budget smartphone’, the A810 on display – at around £90 on PAYG this is a Linux-based mini-tablet intended for people who want smartphone features at a lower cost… The interface and screen size are all much poorer than the best smartphones available, but at this cost I think they may have a good compromise.  Also impressive was the ZN5 – a 5 megapixel cameraphone with Kodak branding and xenon flash (something that helps Nokia’s N82 shoot such great pictures).  This has a WiFi photoframe accessory that is set to automatically show pictures the phone uploads to Kodak’s online photo site (via a Shozu-like feature) and multiple frames can be added.

LG were also present but apart from a nice table setting didn’t have much new to announce.  Disappointingly the PR there didn’t know about the LG blog so I gave up and moved on.  Nice table though…

Sony Ericsson puts the slip down to a “slowing market growth in mid-to-high end phones in markets where Sony Ericsson has a strong presence”. At the same time, the company says it expects all the handsets that it announced previously but will sell in the next quarter will help make a difference in future – like the “high end” Xperia X1 and “high end” Walkman and HSDPA phones. If Sony Ericsson is having trouble shifting high end models and taking a profit hit, perhaps boasting about the slew of high end models coming soon is not the best way to rectify it?