As the BlackBerry Storm arrived this week it showed us just how quick the phone manufactures have worked on getting the next smartphone out and indeed how the Apple iPhone has push the smartphone industry somewhere quite amazing. But will the wireless carriers pricing strategies and the global financial crisis have an adverse affect on the smartphone appeal and limit sales?

In the US smartphone sales jumped up 85 percent between 2007 and 2008 according to research firm NPD. This week as RIM’s BlackBerry Storm and Nokia’s 5800 joining the front runner the Apple iPhone in the touchscreen race, each with their own USP. The Storm with its touch-click keyboard design, Nokia 5800 with its unlimited free music downloads and the iPhone is the user —interface king with its iPhone App store.

Of course we also saw the HTC Google T-Mobile G1, which is basically a cheaper version of the iPhone and on the first ever android platform with its USP being a great commoditizer.

So what will we see for 2009? RIM, Nokia, HTC, Apple are bound to look at each other’s smartphones and see the pros and cons of each device so it wouldn’t take Einstein to guess that soon there will be a smartphone that will have all of the above in one handset, we will see in due course which company is first to produce that smartphone but another thing you can count on is they will get cheaper by the end of 2009.

Before we raise out glasses to cheaper smartphones, one thing that may put a spanner in the works is the wireless carriers data plans, as we are on the brink of global recession consumers all looking more carefully at their monthly bills, although they are coming down slightly it process is extremely slow.

Source: pcmag