The year has ended so it's time to look back at what happened in the world of mobile gaming during 2009.

Equally, the lessons of history are useless without a future to demonstration what we've learnt, so as well as asking various notables about their view on the past 12 months, we're also getting them to look ahead to 2010.

You can see the full list of our end of year interviews here.

Korean publisher Gamevil had a busy 2009, releasing games for Android and well as highly regarded iPhone baseball and role-playing games. However, despite the importance of in-game micro-transaction payments in Korea, it's yet to experiment with that business model in other territories.

Kyu C. Lee is CEO of its US division.

Pocket Gamer: What was the most significant event of 2009?

Kyu C. Lee: Simply put, the rise of the smartphones, driven by the iPhone.

What was the most significant event for Gamevil?

Too many for us to pick, but the launch of Zenonia on the iPhone/iPod touch was the most significant event.

What was your favourite mobile game of 2009?

I think I spent more time reading mobile game reviews, catching up with the trends, than actually playing games. My RSS reader has been my favourite app.

Otherwise for games, I think I played Baseball Superstars 2010 the most, to raise my own character, and then lately Bejeweled 2, because of the Blitz mode.

What do you predict will be the most important trends in 2010?

This year was a dynamic and healthy year of progress for mobile games in general. There was the establishment of app stores with global distribution, which increased the awareness of mobile gaming; new business models such as in-app purchases were introduced; not to forget that free-to-play was enabled. Finally, digital distribution is now happening on every gaming platform, expanding the opportunities for mobile games to move onto other platforms.

2010 will be a year of platform competition. We have a very solid leader in terms of apps, Apple, with platforms like Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Nokia, RIM and also multi-million subscriber-based carriers around the world trying to compete.

Now Apple has proved this works, 2010 will be the real first year where others will try to emulate its success. This is just the beginning of a long battle.

If you could enforce one New Year's resolution, what would it be?

This is only one of my extremely long wish list : Cheaper data plans.

Thanks to Kyu for his time.

You can keep up-to-date with Gamevil via its website and Twitter.