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)

There’s a theory favored by savvy Apple watchers that the first generation iPhone — greeted with such hoopla last year — was not actually the real thing.

That iPhone – the one that hundreds of thousands of Americans queued up to buy for up to $599 apiece, the one that Time magazine named the Invention of the Year, the one that six million people purchased before Apple finally stopped making them in May – was just a trial balloon floated by Steve Jobs to test the airwaves.

According to this theory, the real iPhone – the one aimed at the broadest possible market here and abroad — would start at $199, the magic price point at which consumer electronics devices seem to take off and become mass market phenomena. It would have built-in GPS location tracking, “push” e-mail, and wireless syncing with corporate enterprise networks. Most important, it would run hundreds of third-party applications available through an online App Store and operate over so-called third generation (3G) cellular networks that are two to five times faster than the one used by that first, prototype iPhone.

If this theory is true, then the real iPhone era begins on Friday, July 11, at 8:00 a.m.

That’s when the iPhone 3G goes on sale at Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) outlets in the United States and at the stores of Apple’s cellular partners in some 20 other countries around the world. (Strictly speaking, the era begins early Thursday, when the device goes on sale at 12:01 a.m. New Zealand time. Given how the Earth turns, that corresponds to 8:00 a.m. July 10 at Apple’s New York City flagship store and 5:01 a.m. at its Cupertino headquarters.)

Some things about the new iPhone haven’t changed. Physically, it’s almost identical to the first. Same touch screen, same dimensions — except for the back, which is slightly bulgier and made of black plastic instead of metal.

Conceptually, it’s still one device that combines three of today’s most popular technologies — cellular communications, portable digital music and wireless access to e-mail and the World Wide Web.

And the fundamental breakthrough is the same: unlike most devices that combine several functions and do none of them well, the iPhone puts together three must-have functions and does at least two of them better than they have ever been done before.

Early reviews suggest that the one thing the first iPhone was not particularly good at — telephony — is much improved in the second version, thanks to a redesigned audio system and, perhaps, improvements in AT&T’s network.

There’s still no physical keyboard, so devotees of RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry who were turned off by the lack of tactile feedback when dialing or texting on the first iPhone are not likely to be turned on by the second. The battery is still not user-replaceable, a shortcoming that may be even more important this time given the power demands of operating at 3G speeds. (One early reviewer who was getting nine hours of Internet use on the first iPhone clocked less than six hours on the second. See here.)

The built-in camera is the same under-2 megapixel device that can’t do video. There’s still no way to cut and paste text. And you are still married to AT&T’s cellular network for the life of a two-year contract, at least in the United States. In fact, the bonds of that matrimony may be even stronger this time around, given the way AT&T has set up the in-store activation procedure, and will cost U.S. customers at least $10 a month more.

There are many small improvements. You can search address books, delete e-mails en masse, set parental controls and save e-mailed photos. (These improvements will also be available to owners of the original iPhone as part of a free software upgrade.)

Investors will note that Apple has made major changes in its business model. Rather than testing the waters with a handful of exclusive contracts — first with AT&T, then with O2 (TEF) in England, T-Mobile (DT) in Germany and Orange (FTE) in France — Apple has gone global this time, with deals in six of the seven continents and more than 70 countries. To do this, however, it has had to largely abandon the arrangement — unique among cell phone manufacturers — by which carriers sold the iPhone for full price and kicked back a share of their monthly revenue to Apple, which was accounted for in monthly increments over the life of a cell phone contract (usually 24 months).

Steve Jobs was able to dictate these terms — quite advantageous to Apple — because the carriers recognized that being first to sell the iPhone would win them thousands of new customers. In most of the new markets Apple is entering this year, it is acting more like a conventional cellphone manufacturer, taking its (sizeable) profits upfront and letting the carriers subsidize the device with voice and data plans as costly as local market conditions will allow. (See Canada’s Rogers Communications (RCI), here for example, to see what kinds of problems this can lead to.) The price of the iPhone itself also varies widely, from as much as $888 for pre-paid phones in Italy to $75 in Mexico and free with certain data plans in the U.K.

Except for those costs, none of this affects the experience of the users.

For them, what will really distinguish this iPhone from the one that preceded it — and from every other smartphone out there — is the flood of software expected to be unleashed when the App Store opens on Friday. Apple has already demonstrated more than a dozen third-party programs for the iPhone, and over the next few months you can expect to hear about hundreds more: business apps that take advantage of the iPhones ability to “push” data down the network when it’s available (rather than when it’s requested); games that use the device’s accelerometer to navigate virtual space; shopping and social networking programs that use satellite tracking to tell you what shops or restaurants and which of your friends (or enemies) are near the spot where you are, right now.

In the end, every successful computing device is ultimately a software “platform,” a vehicle for the programs that give it its true value. This is where the real iPhone will stand out, and judging from the interest among the 4,000 third-party developers who have already signed up to write for it, it’s got a good headstart.

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.

One of the advantages Research in Motion’s (RIMM) Blackberry has over Apple (AAPL) is the number of third-party developers writing applications for it: 650 as of last summer, according to RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis (link). Except the rogue developers writing unauthorized apps for jailbroken iPhones, there has been only one developer writing native apps for the iPhone: Apple. Everybody else has been making relatively slow, crippled web apps.

All that changed after the iPhone special event on Thursday. Not only did Apple announce that it was giving IT managers everything they’d asked for in an enterprise cellphone — from push e-mail to a kill pill for lost or stolen iPhones (see here) — it released a software developers kit (SDK) that gives third-party programmers the same tools Apple’s inhouse programmers used to write the apps that come with the iPhone.

The message was clear: Apple is going to battle RIM for the hearts and minds of developers, the key element in any successful computing device. As Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster put it in a report to clients this morning: “The platform with the most active developer community will likely win the battle in the mobile computing arena.”

So how are programmers reacting to the new SDK, which was made available as a free download to registered developers? One sign was that Apple’s servers nearly ground to a halt trying to handle the demand. Valleywag’s Jordon Golson reported at 3:20 p.m. Thursday that he could barely get to the info page.

The developers Apple trotted out to demo — EA, Salesforce, AOL, Epocrates, Sega — certainly seemed pleased with what they were able to produce with two weeks lead time (see here). And the consensus among developers polled after the event was that the SDK exceeded expectations. (See, for example, Ephraim Schwartz’s roundup for InfoWorld.)

“The tools look awesome,” wrote John Gruber on Daring Fireball. “Far better and more advanced than what most Mac developers were expecting.”

Gruber believes developers will accept the terms of the business deal the company is offering them — albeit somewhat grudgingly. “Apple’s 30/70 split with developers is steep, but initial reaction from the developers I follow on Twitter seems to be positive. Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba told me via IM, ‘70%? That’s… that’s… livable,’ which seems to sum up the consensus sentiment.”

But “the $99 fee for getting your app listed in the store [per-developer, not per-app] is a no-brainer,” Gruber adds. “This is going to be a gold rush.” (link)

Despite the initial enthusiasm, taking on the BlackBerry in its home turf is not going to be easy. The iPhone may have captured 28% of U.S. smartphone sales last quarter versus RIM’s 41%, as Jobs proudly announced yesterday, but the installed base of BlackBerries in corporations probably approaches 10 million. The only two companies Apple could name that were using the iPhone as an enterprise device were board-of-director buddies Genentech and Disney.

The first obstacle the iPhone faces are the corporate IT departments that would have to support it. IT is heavily invested in RIM across the board, not just for all those BlackBerries, but for the RIM servers that push data to them.

Moreover, the end users Apple is targeting — all those road warriors with little bricks clipped to their belts — have also made an investment of sorts, an investment of time, energy and brainpower training their thumbs on the BlackBerry’s miniature keyboard. Their complaints about the iPhone’s touchscreen echo the contempt PC users raised on DOS had for the original Mac, with its mouse and graphical user interface.

As Piper Jaffray’s Munster points out, Apple lost the OS wars to Microsoft (MSFT) in the 1980s not because it used a mouse, but because it lacked the support of a robust developer community. In the mobile OS wars to come, Steve Jobs seems determined not to make that mistake again.

Even before Apple (AAPL) launched the iPhone, says American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, he suspected the device would have “mediocre” corporate e-mail support — stemming in part from Microsoft’s (MSFT) “lukewarm support” of Exchange on the Mac platform. (After all, Redmond has its Windows franchise to defend.)

That key weakness is likely to be addressed at the iPhone special event scheduled for next Thursday, according to Wu’s industry and developer sources. And in a report to clients today, he handcaps the ways that might happen:

• from internal development (most likely),
• third-parties including MSFT (next likely) with its ActiveSync technology,
• or RIMM Blackberry Connect (possible but less likely)
• or a combination of two or more.

“We do not think it will be easy to replicate the robustness of Blackberry push e-mail,” he adds, “but nonetheless, we view improvements as positive. Other enhancements we are picking up including improved security, better support of VPNs, and enterprise applications such as CRM.”

Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Research in Motion (RIMM)’s BlackBerry appear to be the primary beneficiaries in what ChangeWave Research describes as a “seismic shift” in the mobile phone market, as record numbers of consumers abandon their basic cell phones for more advanced models. (link)

The investment group polled 4,182 of its members in mid-January and found that the iPhone was the top choice among respondents planning to buy a new cell phone in the next six months (17%) and RIM the second choice (15%).

ChangeWave’s findings dovetail with a report issued earlier this week by Canalys that found that shipments of so-called converged-devices, which include smart phones and wireless handhelds, grew 222 percent in the U.S. during the fourth quarter, and that Apple captured 28 percent of those sales, second only to RIM’s 41 percent. (link)

Perhaps the best news for Apple in the ChangeWave survey is the level of satisfaction reported by owners of iPhones. As in earlier surveys, the percentage of Apple customers who say they are very satisfied (72 percent) towers over those of other vendors. See chart below.

Caveat: ChangeWave surveys are conducted among self-selected respondents who invest in tech stocks and tend to be early adopters. As such, they should be taken as indicators of trends rather than scientific samples of the broader market.