15 Hottest smartphones of 2009

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One of the biggest launches from Sony Ericsson's stable this year was the 12 megapixel Satio. Measuring 112mm x 55mm x 13.3 mm (LxWxD), the phone weighs 126 gm. It comes with a 3.5 inch, 360 x 640 touchscreen.

Symbian-powered Satio is powered by ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz processor and PowerVR SGX graphics. Other features include USB port, FM Stereo, HTML browser, accelerometer, support for multiple audio and video formats and Java support.

Satio comes with 128MB of onboard memory and supports microSD cards of upto 32GB. It has a 12.1 megapixel camera with Xenon Flash. It also carries Face and Smile Detection technology.

Satio is 3G (HSDPA), GPRS/EDGE; packs Wi-Fi, DLNA, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, USB 2.0; and supports GPS with A-GPS support (for Google Maps). The phone is priced at approximately Rs 35,950 in India.

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After the success of HTC Magic and Hero, HTC launched Touch2 in the Indian market. The phone comes pre-loaded with Windows Mobile 6.5 as its operating system. It features a 3.2 megapixel camera, 528MHz processor, 512MB Rom, 256MB RAM and support for additional memory via the microSD slot.

The 12.9mm thick GSM phone supports Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi, GPRS and Edge. HTC Touch2 even has a built-in GPS antenna. It plays a variety of audio and video formats, which can be viewed on its 2.8-inch LCD screen and heard via the internal speakers or by headphones using the 3.5mm audio jack.

The phone weighs in at 110 gram and is priced at around Rs 24,490.

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BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) also unveiled a new version of its touchscreen smartphone BlackBerry Storm2 as the company fights to sustain its supremacy in the smartphone market. The phone, yet to be launched in India, will be the successor to the first BlackBerry touchscreen phone Storm and does away with most of the gaping holes in the earlier version of its first touch screen.

Storm2 features a 3.25-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 360 x 480 pixels. But Storm2, like its predecessor, too doesn’t have a physical keyboard. Instead, it simulates the click of ****ons with an electrical pulse when users touch the screen.

The device will come with a 3.2 megapixel camera with 2x digital zoom, image stabilisation, auto focus, flash and video recording as well as 256 MB of Flash memory. It will have a memory of 2GB which can be extended up to 32GB.

The handset has 3G capabilities, GPS, Bluetooth 2.1, and supports most of the new apps released at BlackBerry App World. Storm2 has a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as a media player for videos, pictures and music. The phone also has Wi-Fi capability like many other BlackBerry devices.

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After the success of Nokia N97, world's top cellphone maker Nokia launched a smaller version of the device called N97 mini in India. Touted as a smaller mobile computer, the phone boasts of a few changes vis-a-vis its predecessor N97.

N97 mini features a 3.2-inch touchscreen and full Qwerty keyboard built into its 14.2mm thin frame. It measures 113 x 52.5 x 14.2mm. Just like N97, mini too has a tilting touchscreen display and a customisable home screen that can be personalised with widgets.

The device packs 8GB of storage which can be expanded to 24GB with the addition of a 16GB microSD card. The mini runs on Symbian S60 OS just like its predecessor.

N97 mini features a 5 megapixel camera with dual LED flash and video light. There is a 4x digital zoom. The camera has a Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.

Available in three colours -- Cherry black, Garnet and White -- Nokia N97 mini is priced at Rs 30,939.

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Nokia launched another music phone in India called Nokia 5530 Xpress Music. The touch music phone is the company's second phone in Xpress Music series to be launched in India.

The phone sports a 2.9 inch TFT touchscreen display, with a 360 x 640 pixel resolution. There's also proximity sensor for automatic turn-off, accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and handwriting rotation. There's also a full-screen Qwerty key board.

Weighing 107 grams, the phone measures 4.09" x 1.92" x 0.51". Nokia 5530 Xpress Music comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus and LED flash. The phone has 4X digital zoom with auto focus.

The Symbian S60 5th edition handset runs on ARM 11 434 MHz processor and has a 128MB RAM memory. Nokia 5530 has a microSD memory card slot with hot swap, up to 16GB (4GB memory card included). The phone's internal memory is 70MB.