A new year is a time to reflect on our achievements in the past dozen months and to set goals for the coming 12 months. That goes for regular folks and multi-national corporations alike. In the spirit of fixing what’s wrong with their mobile phone businesses this year, our favorite cellphone manufacturers have submitted to us their own New Year’s resolutions. Here’s what they’re resolving to accomplish in 2010:
- Research In Motion (RIM)
We resolve to have fewer BlackBerry service outages in 2010. Notice how we aren’t promising to prevent all outages. Also, notice how we don’t make any mention of our terrible web browser. - HTC
First, we’d like to confirm our New Year’s resolution in a tweet. We’ll probably just unconfirm the tweet with a subsequent tweet, but for now just consider it “confirmed.” We resolve to not completely overshadow Windows Mobile hardware like the HD2 with our Android offerings. - Apple
The iPhone is badass, and it’s ours. We don’t really see anything wrong with our business. If you don’t like something, why don’t YOU make a resolution to change your perspective on life. We’re done here. - Motorola
What, didn’t we already prove that we’re making changes for the better? The DROID is awesome, everyone is saying so. You still need a resolution from us? Fine. In that case, our New Year resolution is to not make the same mistakes that we made with the RAZR. We resolve to not beat the DROID’s design to death by flooding the global smartphone market with iteration after iteration of DROID lookalikes. Wait, too late. Damn. - Nokia
In 2010, Nokia resolves to make Symbian prettier, get Maemo 6 out the door, and try to convince anybody that will listen that Apple is treading on our patent portfolio. We would resolve to slow the consumer market share decline we’ve been seeing, but our ancient S60 UI just can’t compete with iPhone or Android, so we’ll just see what happens. - Samsung
Samsung Mobile knows that most of you don’t like the TouchWIZ UI. We also know that TouchWIZ combined with our new 3D Cube is just plain confusing. So, Samsung Mobile resolves to kill off TouchWIZ or the 3D Cube or both. As a side note, we also plan to release a super-quiet clothes washer/dryer combo powered by the Bada OS. - LG
We didn’t realize how badly Windows Mobile would hold up against the iPhone and Android platforms. We wish we had known this when we professed our undying love for Ballmer and Windows Mobile at last year’s Mobile World Congress. We resolve to make better decisions about smartphone platforms in the future. Oh, and we also promise to look into making the S-Class 3D UI better… somehow. - Palm
We don’t have any real resolutions for 2010. We just hope the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi can gain more traction on Verizon’s network than it did on Sprint. We have no idea what else to do. Bono and Elevation Partners will be pissed if we go under. - Sony Ericsson
Our smartphones tend to be pretty but never really catch on as global phenomena, like the iPhone. We know our XPERIA lineup is the shit. You know you want an XPERIA X10 when it launches. We resolve to market the hell out of the X10 and lock down partner carriers willing to subsidize a big chunk of its cost.
So, there you have it, folks. Only time will tell if these mobile phone makers follow through on their resolutions. If they’re like us, though, they’ll last a week. Okay, maybe more like 5 days.