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)

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.

Here are two pictures worth a couple thousand words. They’re from a study commissioned by Symbian (jointly owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung), but published so quietly that we might never had heard about it if Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted had not dug it out.

What the study shows, among other things, is that, in its first full quarter of sales, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone outsold all the smartphones in the North American market except for RIM’s (RIMM) Blackberry. That puts it ahead of the entire field of devices running Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile, Linux or Palm OS.

As Dilger puts it, the iPhone’s debut at second place is particularly noteworthy because …

… the iPhone was only being sold in the US, and is only available through AT&T; all of the other mobile platforms are available to Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile as well as AT&T. The iPhone wasn’t available in the significant markets of Canada and Mexico, along with parts of the US that AT&T does not service, including much of Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Alaska.

For more analysis of the study and what it means for Microsoft, Symbian and beleaguered Palm (PALM), see Roughly Drafted’s full report here.