The New Year always carries assessments about what happened and resolutions for the following twelve months. Someone also looks back at past predictions, seizing the moment to evaluate them with hindsight.

By applying all of this to consumer electronics, I think Apple’s iPhone has determined the most relevant market trend across 2009, being much more than the excellent niche product someone had initially considered it. While touch screens and widgets/applications have swiftly become a must for everyone out there, I’m asking myself: who’s going to play a similar role in 2010?

My bet is on ebook readers.

On the way to explaining this statement, let’s make one step back. Gartner, a market research firm, believes every technologies go through a hype cycle before gaining a widespread diffusion: after a peak of inflated expectations, there’s a “trough of disillusionment” before the technology reaches the “slope of enlightment”.

In Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle Report, issued in July 2009, ebook readers were placed at the maximum level of expectations, just before the disillusionment phase.

Six months later, I believe this phase could be almost over. Using the chart below as an instruction manual, ebook readers are in my opinion where competition increases and second generation products reach the market.

Time (the horizontal axis) is running so fast that ebook readers could be climbing the scope in six months, when Gartner’s next report is expected to be issued.

This technology has the potential to eventually change the way we’ve been reading for centuries. The Internet is already doing it for news and every other short/medium length text. Ebook readers could finish the job.

The huge retailer Amazon, originally born just as a bookshop, is leading the ebook readers market not by accident with its Kindle, whose DX version has gained worldwide 3G coverage just today (the more popular Kindle 2 already had it).

Moreover, the potentially most brilliant competitor happens to be the Nook from Barnes & Noble, a US-based bookseller. The Nook is still young but adds a small LCD touch screen for navigation and is powered by Android operating system, which could support interesting features like (back to the 2009 must-haves) widgets.

This means one thing: content eventually rules over features.

No matter what Sony or others are going to launch in technical terms. A seamless access to books and magazines is definitely the key aspect.