Ever wonder what stories of 2009 the people of the Internet found most interesting? I can’t really help you there, but I can tell you which stories on MobileCrunch got the most pageviews. Now, you might assume that most of our popular stories involved the iPhone, but — well, actually, you’d be right.

The iPhone isn’t alone on the list, of course; Android makes a handful of appearances amongst our most popular stories, including one that I never would have seen coming.

1. Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid: It was the battle of the century – or at least the battle of the year. Our final call may not have been decisive, but at least it was exhaustive.
2. Tutorial: How to Tether on an iPhone 3G or 3GS running OS 3.1.2: I wrote this post on a whim while killing time in a coffee shop in early November, and it goes on to dominate just about every other post we’ve written this year. Thanks, Google!
3. iPhone Homescreen Exposé Concept: Would you use this?: In October 2009, a Swedish design house made an awesome mock-up video of an alternative homescreen for the iPhone. Within weeks of this post blowing up on various social sites, the jailbreak community turned the concept into a reality.
4. Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Round 2: People always say that sequels are never as good as the original – and in terms of pageviews, it looks like they’re right. It probably doesn’t help that we warned people that part 2 was strictly for the Droid-obsessed.
5. Rumor: HTC working on new flagship Android device – the Dragon: This one was a sleeper success. It flew almost entirely under the radar until word of Google’s Nexus One began trickling out months later. As the rumor mill churned over the Nexus, the pageview count on related posts spiked.
6. Exclusive: Everything There Is To Know About Nokia’s Next Tablet: It’s one of our top posts of the year, and also one that I’m most proud of. We not only scooped the existence of the Nokia N900, but we exhaustively confirmed every single minute detail many months before Nokia made it all official.
7. Ten Apps All New Android Users Should Check Out: The name says it all; with the Android Market exploding the way it is right now, we’re going to have to do another one of these.
8. Apple moves to block jailbreaks once and for all: Gasp! Apple blocks jailbreaks in new iPhones! (Minutes later: Gasp! Jailbreakers find their way around the block.)
9. Apple bans another developer, 1,000 apps pulled: There was no shortage of stories about Apple denying or pulling applications from the App Store this year – but when they nix 1,000 applications in one fell swoop, it’s worth reading about.
10. 8 Little Things We Still Can’t Stand About The iPhone: What better way to cap off a year dominated by the iPhone than to discuss all the things we don’t like about it?

2009 was a huge year for MobileCrunch; readership is many, many times higher than it was just a year ago. We’re going to start 2010 off with a bang next week at CES, and things will only get better from there. We’ve got big plans for this place, and I look forward to every minute of it. Happy New Year, folks!

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Forget the iSlate, an unconfirmed rumor suggests that HTC may have multiple models of a new touchscreen tablet, a device that the Taiwanese handset manufacturer has been secretly working on for the last 18 months, ready for debut. One model of the rumored tablet will feature a Qualcomm processor (Snapdragon?), a touchscreen display (multi-touch?), new software from Adobe (Flash?) and will run Android. The tablet will reportedly be shown to a select group of HTC customers at a private showing next week during CES. HTC has been working closely with Google in the development of the tablet and is expected to roll out a second model of the touchscreen tablet with Google’s Chrome OS. Slap some wireless 3G connectivity onto these slates and HTC may win the prize as the manufacturer with the hottest portfolio in 2010.

[Via Slashgear]

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Remember the last time Samsung went more than a few days without launching a new phone? Yeah, neither do we – so you’ll have to pardon us if we sound a bit skeptical here. When we got word that Samsung Mobile was holding their CES press conference at the ungodly hour of 7:30 A.M on the Day 2 of CES (otherwise known as Day 1 of being hungover), my curiosity was piqued. I mean, who the hell launches a new phone at 7:30 in the morning, halfway through a show? Not Samsung, it seems.

We reached out to a source who has never steered us wrong with the Samsung-related knowledge before, in hopes that they could shed some light on what ol’ Sammies prepping for launch. Their response? There’s nothing to shed light on. As of this morning, roughly a week before what is quite easily the most important electronics show in the US, we’re told Samsung Mobile has no plans to launch any handsets at CES. Expect TVs-a-plenty from Samsung – but unless something changes soon, all will be quiet on the mobile front.

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Oh, Android – how good you have been for Motorola. It was only months ago that they were teetering on the edge of obscurity; one 350-person Android task force later, they’ve got the most popular Android handset in the lands and are being name dropped on a nearly daily basis around the rumor mill.

A Chinese leakster managed to get his mitts on this (confusingly obscured) shot of an unreleased Motorola handset, and was nice enough to share it with the world. According to the original source, the handset you see up there is called the Motorola Shadow (or “Mirage”, depending on who’s translation you believe.) What the tipster lacks in well-framed pictures, they make up for with knowledge of the specs: coming in at a ridiculously thin 9mm, this baby supposedly packs a monstrous 4.3 inch screen running at a resolution of 850×484, an HDMI port (shown in the pic), and an 8 megapixel camera ready to shoot video in 1080p. They don’t mention an operating system, and the pic doesn’t help much in that department – but unless Motorola’s doing something crazy, it’s a pretty safe bet that we’re looking at a UI mod of Android.

[Via Electronista]

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From all of us here at Thoughts Media, have a Happy New Year! May 2010 be a great year for you and your families, full of blessings, opportunities, and health. Have a safe New Year’s eve!

Mobile World Congress 2010 is not as interesting an event as it might seem from the distance, since Nokia have recently announced that they won’t be present in Barcelona, when it starts. Now, a rumour has just gone loose, stating that LG will also skip this event, taking place in February.

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After a recent major come-back, Motorola is rumored to be planning something major for CES next week. Analysts are predicting that on January 6, Motorola will be announcing an Android device for AT&T, and the only guess that leaves us with right now is the Motorola Motus. A second device is slated for Verizon Wireless, according to rumors, and if we had to bet, you’ll see the Motorola Calgary. These are just rumors for now, but we’ll see soon enough.

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We’ve seen video comparisons between mobile browsers, processors and entire phones, but it’s very rare that we get to compare a couple of handset displays, according to the way they reflect sunlight. Here’s Samsung Omnia II facing Nokia’s N900 in this sort of duel:

Omnia’s got an OLED display, while the Nokia smartphone uses an LCD display. Of course, Samsung’s device has the upper hand in this battle, which is pretty strange, considering the general opinion that states the OLED is very bad in direct sunlight.

The folks of OLED-info.com even posted a story a couple of months ago, regarding a bunch of displays that were completely unreadable in sunlight and they used the OLED technology. It seems that the newer displays of this kind are much brighter and behave better.

[via Permalink | Comments | Author )

A new video emerged this week which supposedly showcases an individual playing Half Life 2 using Project Natal, Microsoft’s upcoming motion control platform for the Xbox 360. The video is blurry and crudely recorded but you can see places where the player is moving objects in the game by gesturing with his hands. This Half Life 2 video is eerily similar to another rumored Project Natal video which surfaced late last week. In this other, earlier video, the same person in what looks to be the same environment is reportedly demoing Geometry Wars. Check out both videos and let us know what you think of these potentially early demos of Project Natal.

[Via GossipGamer and Destructoid]

Samsung and Sharp’s patent battle took a fresh turn today as US’ trade court has agreed to inquire the allegations put forth by Samsung against Sharp. Samsung has alleged that Sharp has infringed some Samsung patents related to manufacturing LCD screens.

Generally, companies engaged in a patent battle come to terms with a cross-licensing agreement but Samsung and Sharp are unable to come to a solution since their first suit filed couple of years back.

Samsung and Sharp are also fighting LCD-related patent cases in Japan, Germany and few other countries.

Related posts:

1. Samsung loses Sharp LCD patent case, says they’re unaffected
2. Samsung KOs Sharp in LCD Patent case
3. Sharp infringes one Samsung patent while Samsung infringes four

Our Chinese is a bit rusty and the details are sparse but it looks like Motorola may be brewing up another Android-powered handset. This handset, codenamed the Mirage or the Shadow, breaks the mold by sporting a 4.3 inch, 800×484 display instead of the now standard 3.7 inch display. It is also rumored to include an HDMI port, 8 megapixel camera, 1080p video playback and measures a mere 9.0mm in thickness. The rendering provided is crude but the handset appears to have the same angular design of the Motorola DROID and Milestone. That is all we have on this Mirage/Shadow as no other details are available. Anyone out there care to fill in the blanks?

Thanks, Bryan!Read

If you were a hardcore skeptic and entertaining serious doubts about the Apple tablet, well, let’s just say Clearwire’s latest home page won’t do you any good. Spotted just behind the Zune HD there, and to the left of a PSP Go, there is an odd looking creature with a shiny touch screen, a dock on the left side and a background and toolbar that looks suspiciously Apple-esque. Unfortunately, it’s also a fake tablet image we’ve seen before that has floated around the internetz. Better luck next time, Clearwire?

Thanks, Nicholas!

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Between CES and Google’s press event, next week is bound to be a torrential mess of press releases. Looking to sneak onto the radar before every tech writer in the lands is pulled into cranking out post after post on the latest and great from the industry’s big guns, iPhone accessory maker Mophie has gone ahead and put their upcoming wares on the table.

Known primarily for their battery packs and cases, Mophie is about to jump into a whole new ball pit: credit card readers for the iPhone.

Considering that Mophie has thus far stuck solely to the hardware end of the iPhone add-on game, this seems like an odd market for them to dive into. So much so, in fact, that I initially thought they were just releasing the credit card reader (pictured above) as an alternative to typing your credit card into various applications by hand or, perhaps, as a more aesthetically pleasing piece of hardware for Jack Dorsey’s Square.

With a bit more reading, however, it looks Mophie might be prepping to square off (had to do it) against Dorsey’s service with a software solution of their own. Here’s what Mophie said on the matter:

Marking its first combination hardware and private label iPhone application device, mophie is launching its innovative new credit card reader, empowering users to complete financial transactions on the go.

The wording of that was just vague enough that it left things a bit unclear; they are indeed bringing their own software – but what was it for? Under that definition, this could still be little more than an easier (if a bit silly) way for consumers to input credit card numbers whilst ordering online. We prodded for more info – here’s the response:

The credit card reader works with an iPhone application and is meant for small business owners to conduct transactions easier.

So there we have it folks – Mophie’s getting into the transaction business. Whether or not they’ll be handling the payment processing themselves (as Square is) or simply acting as a middle-man for a service like Paypal or Authorize.net is still unclear. Look for more details to emerge during CES next week.

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We get the feeling that early 2010 is going to be big for Sprint’s WiMax. We came by one of these training slides for a new 3G/4G mobile hotspot, precisely like the Mi-Fi, for Sprint. Like many of Sprint’s wireless data cards, this one is also going to be made by Sierra Wireless. What we’re hearing is that this new device will be able to support up to five users via Wi-Fi and its range is being increased to 100 feet. In addition to the added range and power, it will also support SD card storage; while that doesn’t sound like a big deal, the data can be shared by every user who is connected to the data card. No official pricing or release date just yet, but we’re looking at a possibly February launch for this dual 3G-4G wireless hotspot in your pocket.

“We’re not sure we’d be able to find a piece of hardware that made us adore Windows Mobile 6.5 the same way we adore puppies or a hot cup of cocoa, but that doesn’t mean that the usual suspects — HTC, Samsung, LG, and the like — aren’t producing some magnificent hardware on which to run it. Today we’ve had a chance to give LG’s new eXpo for AT&T a quick once-over, and on paper, this is a hell of a handset: 5 megapixel autofocus cam, a fingerprint sensor that doubles as a d-pad, Snapdragon power, a WVGA display, full QWERTY, and most notably, support for an optional microprojector add-on”

The LG eXpo is hitting the news big as of late, and Engadget has their two cents out if you’re interested and want to take a look at both some nice pictures of the device and some interesting reading!