Top 10 battlegrounds of 2009

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Posted on 23 Dec 2008 at 17:41

The next year will be crucial for dozens of companies - many of which will be going head-to-head in a relentless battle for sales and market share.

We've examined which companies will be gunning for each other in 2009 and named the big products that will be on the front line, fighting for supremacy in the year ahead.

1.Android vs iPhone v Windows Mobile v Symbian
Apple has waded into the smartphone fray and transformed the way we interact with these devices - the fiddly keyboard has been despatched in favour of an innovative touchscreen.

We can't wait to see how the competition responds. Two new releases of Windows Mobile are scheduled - the incremental update of 6.5 and a major revision, version 7, in the latter half of 2009.

Android looks promising, as we noted in our review of the T-Mobile G1 but needs support from better hardware before it can really begin to challenge.

Symbian remains the world's leading smartphone OS, but is badly in need of a refresh. It will be interesting to see if any of these familiar names can come up with something as user-friendly as Apple's iPhone OS in the coming year.

2. Larrabee vs CUDA
Graphics cards have always been gaming territory, but 2009 could see people realising that the GPU is just as good at medical research as it is at blasting through Far Cry 2 or Crysis.

GPGPU technology embraces the idea that the hefty processing power in a modern graphics card can contribute to tasks other than gaming.

It's an idea that's already been explored through applications such as Folding@Home and SETI - organisations that use parallel computing power to conduct large-scale experiments, such as medical research or searching for extra-terrestrial life.

While these have been well-known in IT circles for several years, mainstream adoption of GPGPU techniques - and increasingly powerful graphics cards - mean that it could gain mainstream popularity in 2009.

3.Internet Explorer 8 v Firefox v Chrome
Google's surprise release of Chrome, its stripped-back browser with OS pretensions, caught many by surprise - not least Mozilla, which relies on Google cash to keep Firefox afloat.

Chrome's birth hasn't been without complications. Market share has hit a plateau since the initial release hype, with Google rushing the product out of beta to supposedly drive consumer confidence.

The other big browsers are fighting back, too: Internet Explorer 8 is looking like the most competent browser we've seen from Microsoft in years, and Firefox 3.1 is currently sitting in beta, with a faster JavaScript engine purring away.

Can Google apply brute force or brilliant new features to persuade people to take-up its browser? We're about to find out.

4. Core i7 v Phenom II
AMD and Intel have waded into the latest round of CPU releases with vastly different strategies. Whereas the top-end Core i7 chips cost a huge amount of money but provide a phenomenal level of performance, AMD has tried to balance speed with price - as it's done so successfully with the latest generation of Radeon graphics cards.

It's poised to be a fascinating contest: the Phenom II-920 is expected to be as quick as the Core i7-920, and several sites are already offering pre-orders, where the AMD chip is listed as being slightly cheaper at £180, compared to £198 for the Core i7.