Who says you can’t have it both ways?

With RIM’s (RIMM) touchscreen BlackBerry Storm set to be released in the United States next Friday, CIO.com has published eight reasons to choose the Storm over Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

The same day, it published eight reasons to pick the iPhone over the Storm.

Both pieces are by Al Sacco, who probably doesn’t pay for the phones he reviews.

Here’s why he prefers the Storm:

1. Stereo Bluetooth capability
2. Removable battery
3. Expandable memory
4. Video recording
5. Works as a tethered modem
6. Tactile feedback
7. Copy and paste
8. Multitasking

Here’s why he prefers the iPhone

1. It’s now second-generation
2. Built-in memory
3. iTunes App Store
4. iTunes integration
5. Full QWERY (virtual) keyboard
6. Wi-Fi support
7. iPod media player
8. Safari browser

To learn more, click here for why you should pick the Storm and here for the iPhone.

A snapshot of the global smartphone market issued Thursday by Canalys shows just how big a dent Apple’s iPhone made in the cellphone universe last quarter.

With a surge of nearly 6.9 million shipments in calendar Q3, the iPhone leapfrogged past RIM (RIMM) and Motorola (MOT) to grab 17.3% of the smartphone market.

That put Apple (AAPL) in second place after Nokia, and helped cut the market-leader’s share from 51.4% to 38.9%.

It also helped expand the entire smartphone category, which grew 28% from the same quarter last year to reach 40 million phones. The much larger cellphone market, by contrast, grew 3%.

Canalys also reports that Apple grabbed the No. 2 spot in smartphone operating systems, as the next table shows. Nokia’s Symbian still dominates with 46.6% market share, but that’s down sharply from 68.1% last year. RIM, Microsoft (MSFT) and Linux also registered gains, but nothing that compares with Apple’s.

The Canalys report came the same day as a survey of business users that showed the iPhone leading all other smartphones in terms of customer satisfaction. See J.D. Power: iPhone beats BlackBerry.

However the iPhone’s reign as No. 2 could be short-lived, according to Canalys. The U.K.-based research firm expects RIM to overtake Apple in the December quarter. RIM is selling three new products this holiday season — the Bold, Storm and Pearl 8220. If Steve Jobs has any more iPhones up his sleeve, we won’t see them before Macworld in January.

So much for the physical keyboard — the lack of which on the iPhone was supposed to be a deal breaker for hardcore smartphone users in the business world.

Despite its much-maligned touchscreen, the iPhone ranks highest in customer satisfaction among business types, according to J.D. Power and Associates’ second annual survey of smartphone users. Apple’s (AAPL) device easily outscored phones with physical keys made by RIM (RIMM), Samsung, HTC (HTC) and Motorola (MOT).

Apple racked up 778 points on a scale of 1,000, according to a press release issued Thursday, “performing particularly well in the ease of operation, physical design and handset feature factors.”

The BlackBerry scored highest in J.D. Power’s 2007 survey with 702 points; this year it came in second with 703 points.

The iPhone didn’t even make the cut last year.

“With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has clearly differentiated itself from the competition in areas that are most important to business smartphone users,” said Kirk Parsons, J.D. Power senior director of wireless services. “By making basic applications and features easy to use and providing functionality in a thin, lightweight device, Apple has performed well in exceeding customer expectations.” (link)

Keyboards are an important factor when choosing smartphones, but not the most important factor. According to the survey, the top five reasons given for picking a particular model are Internet capability (45%), ability to use e-mail account (41%), overall design/style (39%), Bluetooth capabilities (37%) and keyboard style (37%).

Among the survey’s other findings:

• Smartphones are buggy. 44% of respondents reported having to reboot their device at least once a week during the past 12 months, while 34% experienced either an application malfunction or application freeze one or more times per week.
• Prices are falling. The average purchase price of a smartphone device was $216, compared with $261 in 2007. Apple owners report the highest average purchase price at $337, while Motorola owners report the lowest at $169.
• Games are popular. 34% of business smartphone owners say they download third-party software, including games (49%), business applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel (43%) and travel-related programs (36%).

The study was based on responses from 1,388 business wireless customers who currently own a smartphone. It was fielded between August and September 2008. Overall satisfaction was measured across five factors: ease of operation (27%); operating system (24%); physical design (21%); handset features (18%); and battery aspects (10%).

See also Smackdown: BlackBerry Bold 9000 vs. Apple iPhone 3G, iPhone vs. BlackBerry 9000: The keyboard wars, round 2 and iPhone vs. BlackBerry: A battle for hearts and minds of developers

A quick glance at the chart at right would suggest that it’s all over for the BlackBerry.

It’s from the latest quarterly ChangeWave survey — taken shortly after the June 9 unveiling of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone 3G — and it shows that among consumers planning to buy smartphones in the next 90 days, 56% plan to purchase iPhones, double the percentage who plan to buy RIM (RIMM) BlackBerries. (The less said about Palm’s (PALM) prospects the better.)

But a few caveats are in order, only some of them provided by ChangeWave’s Paul Carton in his report on the survey here.

First of all, as Carton points out, although the results are based on a sample of 3,567 consumers, the chart  represents only the views of the 10.5% — fewer than 375 people — who plan to make a purchase in the next 90 days. That 10.5%, however, is a record for the survey, up from 7.4% last month; interest in smartphones is clearly high these days.

What Carton doesn’t say is that those 375 consumers are hardly a representative sample of the buying public. According to its website,

ChangeWave runs a proprietary network of 15,000 highly qualified business, technology, and medical professionals referred to as the ChangeWave Alliance. Alliance members are credentialed experts in leading companies of select industries who spend their everyday lives working on the frontline of technological change. (link)

Professionals working on the frontline of technological change, one presumes, are more disposed both to choose a smartphone over a regular cellphone and to buy the latest gadget to hit the market.

Moreover, anyone who receives ChangeWave’s regular e-mails knows to take both their advice and their findings with a grain of salt. A recent “Urgent Alert,” entitled “Could July 7 Become the Next Black Monday?,” included this all-red, all-cap headline:

INVEST CORRECTLY NOW AND YOU’LL MAKE MILLIONS
MAKE THE WRONG MOVE AND YOU’LL LOSE A FORTUNE

Still, ChangeWave survey’s do offer regular snapshots into the views of a subset of users, and RIM should not take their results lightly. Among ChangeWave’s most useful findings are reports of customer satisfaction, in which the iPhone consistently shines. The latest results:

An extraordinary four-in-five iPhone owners (78%) report they’re Very Satisfied with their iPhone. RIM ranks second, with a highly respectable 54% of its customers saying they’re Very Satisfied. Palm (29%), while up a few points since our previous survey, still ranks near the bottom in terms of customer satisfaction. (link)

Starting soon: the smartphone smackdown of summer ‘08.

Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 3G goes on sale in less than three weeks, on July 11. The official U.S. release date of RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry Bold 9000 is “July/August,” although according to the Boy Genius Report, the device could arrive in Canada as early as this Wednesday.

So how do the year’s most eagerly-awaited smartphones stack up?

Pinstack.com has published the handy tale of the tape shown at right (click on the image to see it full size). Meanwhile, Crackberry.com produced what is still the most exhaustive hands-on review of the new BlackBerry, using a pre-release version purchased in May on eBay. The YouTube version is pasted below (e-mail subscribers, click here).

The iPhone Blog, CrackBerry’s sister site, has posted a video side-by-side of the iPhone and the BlackBerry Bold, but it’s not as useful; it uses the old iPhone and by the time they got their hands on CrackBerry’s Bold, RIM had turned off the PINs. You can see that video on YouTube here.

What none of these comparisons can predict, of course, is how rich the two software ecosystems are likely to be, and how much value third-party apps will add to either device.

See also: The keyboard wars, Round 2

[Chart reposted with kind permission of Hayden James at Pinstack.com.]

After drifting inexplicably in February, March and April — actually losing market share in two out of three months just when Macintosh sales seemed to be on fire — Mac OS X recovered smartly in the Net Applications survey issued overnight Sunday.

Apple’s (AAPL) share of the operating system market grew 5.69% in May to hit a record 7.80%, while Windows in all its flavors dropped half a point to 91.17%. That’s a record low for Microsoft (MSFT), which nonetheless still runs on 9 out of 10 computers on the Internet, as Net Applications measures it (more on its methodology below).

The iPhone’s OS market share, whch Net Applications measures separately from OS X, has temporarily leveled off, according to the report, reflecting the shortage of product as Apple cleared inventory in May and customers held off purchases in anticipation of the new 3G model. In an IDC report issued Friday, the iPhone actually lost share in the smartphone market, falling from 26.7% in the last quarter of 2007 to 19.2% in the first quarter of 2008. RIM (RIMM), meanwhile, gained share in the same period, growing from 35.1% to 44.5% on the strength of new, consumer-oriented BlackBerries. (see here)

The discrepancy between IDC’s and NetApplication’s numbers can be explained to some extent by the nature of the two surveys. IDC’s quarterly reports are sales counts, based on surveys of retail outlets. Net Applications, by contrast, collects data from the browsers of visitors — some 160 million per month — to its customers websites. As such, its findings are probably better described as a snapshot of installed base taken from a less-than-random sample. But the results are useful for indicating trends, and tend to correspond well to domestic market share as measured by more traditional methods.

To see Net Application’s June 1 report, click here. The results are summarized in the table below:

Subscribers: to see the chart, click here.

“It’s the software, stupid.”

That’s the take-home message of a research note sent to clients Wednesday by Needham & Co.’s Charlie Wolf, who initiated coverage of Research in Motion (RIMM) with an unenthusiastic “hold.”

While Wolf sees little risk to RIM’s grip on power users in corporations, he warns that the company’s recent growth spurt, driven largely by a successful run at the consumer market, may soon run into a roadblock.

“RIM quickly captured the pole position in the consumer market with the sleek Pearl,” he writes. By contrast, RIM’s major competitors, Motorola (MOT), Samsung, HTC and Palm (PALM), all stumbled, according to Wolf, “because they attempted to invade the consumer market using the Windows Mobile operating system, at best a difficult-to-use platform.”

All that could change, he says, when Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone software developers kit (with enterprise support) comes out of beta in June and Google’s (GOOG) Android system arrives later in the year.

“In contrast with BlackBerry’s comparatively primitive development platform, applications on the iPhone will be able to exploit the much more powerful Mac OS 10 operating system as well as the next-generation multimedia capabilities built into the phone that no competitor has come close to matching.”

Android could also pose a threat to RIM, but Wolf is less sanguine about Google’s software. “It’s way too early,” he says, “to declare the Android platform a success.”

Wolf’s 2009 forecast has RIM earning $4.05 per share on revenue of $10.2 billion, compared with earnings of $2.26 on revenues of $6.0 billion in 2008. In other circumstances that might sound like a solid “buy.” But RIM’s shares have been trading over $120 lately, which implies growth at a rate that Wolf fears the company might have trouble sustaining once it faces competition from iPhone 2.0 and the Android smartphones.

Michael Mace at Rubicon Consulting, a small research firm based in Los Gatos, Calif., has done anybody interested in the iPhone two favors: 1) He published a first-rate piece of research on the impact of the device on its owners and Apple’s (AAPL) competitors, and 2) He has made his results easily — and freely — available on the Web.

The key findings — based on interviews with 460 randomly selected iPhone users in the United States — are summarized in a dozen Quick Facts and ten Implications, both available here. Some of the bullet points:

• iPhone owners tend to be young and well heeled; 15% are students
• 75% were already Apple customers; getting beyond the early adopters could be a challenge
• 28% say they use the iPhone to replace a notebook computer
• AT&T (T) is doing well by the deal — to the tune of $2 billion extra revenue a year

The full 35-page white paper — with color charts — can be downloaded as a PDF from the same Rubicon site. It’s easy reading and worth your time.

For those of you who don’t make it all the way to the white paper, three charts struck me as particularly useful.

The first is a bar chart showing what people do with their iPhones — daily, occasionally or never. Checking e-mail jumps out as the No. 1 thing most do every day, but it’s interesting how many fewer actually compose e-mail on the device. And it’s also interesting to see what most iPhone users never or rarely do with the device — like buy music, watch videos or read maps.

One function we wish had been included in the first chart — use the iPhone to make and receive phone calls — is explored in the pie chart below. It turns out, one out of three iPhone owners carry around two phones. The RIM (RIMM) BlackBerry is the most popular second phone — used by nearly one in ten iPhone owners. Mace speculates that that will probably change when the iPhone gets Exchange support. But we wonder how many iPhone owners keep a simple, cheap cell phone with them either because they’re running out their contract with their original carrier or because it just works better as a phone.

The third chart is the one that shows whose ox got gored when Apple entered the smartphone market. The big loser was Motorola (MOT); nearly a quarter of iPhone owners traded up from a Razr. Another big slice comes from RIM, but Mace believes that it’s Microsoft (MSFT) — squeezed between Apple and (GOOG) — that faces the biggest challenge down the road. More on that below the chart.

Here’s why Mace believes Microsoft faces “severe challenges” in the smartphone market:

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile is sandwiched between two big competitors, Google and Apple. Apple is crafting hardware-software systems that deliver a great user experience, while Google is giving away an operating system to the very companies that license Windows Mobile today. It’s possible for Microsoft to try to compete on both fronts, but creating a proprietary device and at the same time selling an operating system to others is extraordinarily difficult (Palm tried to do it and ended up splitting the company in two).

We think Microsoft should probably decide whether it wants to compete in devices (in which case it will need to create its own phones, as it did for music players with the Zune) or compete in operating systems (in which case it will probably have to give away Windows Mobile for free).

Both alternatives are very high-risk, and require business models that are outside Microsoft’s core competencies. The company’s recent purchase of Danger, which designed the TMobile Sidekick, may indicate that it intends to go the device route. (link)

Three pictures from the latest ChangeWave smartphone survey offer good news for Apple, mixed news for Research in Motion and terrible news for Palm. All three are from a survey of 3,597 high-end consumers conducted between March 17 and March 24. See here.

The first shows current market share among the respondents. Apple’s (AAPL) upward climb is accelerating, RIM (RIMM) is easing slightly but still holding its own, and Palm (PALM) is down for the seventh consecutive ChangeWave survey, dating back to June 2006.

The second picture is a bar chart showing the percentage of customers who indicate they are “very satisfied” with their smartphone. Apple iPhone satisfaction is at near-record levels. RIM is hovering over 50%. And Palm has fallen to the bottom of the heap, below even Sony and Motorola.

The last chart shows the preferences of the respondents who say they plan to buy a smartphone over the next three months. The iPhone has for the first time passed the RIM in this survey - “up a whopping 12 points” since January, as ChangeWave’s Paul Carton puts it. RIM is down 3 points and Palm is down 5.

Carton attributes the sharply increased interest in the iPhone among ChargeWave’s membership to the flurry of announcements surrounding release of the iPhone Software Developers Kit. Sounds right to me.

Do smartphones really need physical keys?

The folks who designed Apple’s iPhone bet that touchscreen keys would be good enough for most users, and based on a February survey of iPhone owners that found 72% “very satisfied” (versus 55% for RIM), Apple’s gamble seems to have paid off.

The complaints about the virtual keys that were so persistent when the iPhone first came out have largely gone away.

But not quite. Just as Apple (AAPL) begins manufacturing the second coming of its famous smartphone, we have two new data points suggesting that the keyboard wars are far from over.

The first comes from an open letter to Steve Jobs posted by Dan Tynan at PC World in which he lists “5 Things iPhone 2.0 Must Have.” No. 1 on his list: “Enlarge the Friggin’ Keyboard.” (link)

Tynan cites an Aug. 2007 User Centric test in which 20 veteran thumb typists were confronted with the iPhone for the first time and, not surprisingly, took twice as long to enter text and made more errors. (link)

What does Tynan suggest that Apple do about that? He likes the slide-out keyboard that HTC built for AT&T’s (T) Tilt, a solution he describes as “nifty.”

Given how hard Steve Jobs and his team worked to design the iPhone — stripping it down to bare essentials and selecting a form factor with as few moving parts as possible — they are unlikely to take kindly to Tynan’s suggestion.

The second data point comes from Engadget, which has released what it says are the first leaked photographs of the new RIM (RIMM) BlackBerry 9000. (See their gallery of photos here.) SteveJack at MacDailyNews was the first to point out the resemblance to — and the key difference with — the iPhone. He writes:

“RIM clearly seems to have tried to copy Apple’s iPhone’s exterior look, but beyond that derivative bit of attempted tomfoolery, the anachronistic physical buttons remain, taking up space whether or not they’re in use.

Also remaining is the small screen, mashed into the upper half of the device in order to make room for those tiny, slippery-looking plastic buttons festooned all over the bottom half of the device. The software’s UI has been prettied or messed up (depending on your taste), but it has none of the multi-touch goodness of Apple’s iPhone. It’s the same old, same old in an iPhone-inspired wrapper.

You can judge the distance behind and overall cluelessness of iPhone’s future roadkill by the amount they copy the iPhone’s exterior. See: LG, HTC, and now RIM, among many others. This ceaseless quest to dress up antiques in Apple veneer is pathetic and sad.”(link)

A partisan review, to be sure, and more than a bit over the top. But he may have a point.