With Palm’s (PALM) quarterly earnings due Thursday — along with Jon Rubinstein’s debut performance as CEO — analysts have started to place their bets on what the quarter will show.

First out of the box — or at least, first in our inbox — is RBC Capital’s Mike Abramsky, who expects investors to look past soft fourth-quarter results and focus on the potential for growth in the next fiscal year.

Specifically, his report to clients reports …

• 150,000 Pres. Having estimated that Sprint (S) sold 50,000 Pres in the device’s June 6-7 opening weekend, Abramsky now estimates total sales to date of 150,000 units (up from his previous estimate of 120,000)
• Strong demand. Citing a June ChangeWave survey that showed Palm buying intentions doubling between March and June, to 8% from 4%, Abramsky says demand for the Pre is strong and inventories low. Most Sprint stores are sold out despite daily replenishments.
• More handsets. Abramsky is expecting Palm to release a smaller $99 model before the end of fiscal 2009 and additional devices in calendar 2010.
• More carriers. In additional to Bell Canada, Abramsky is looking for Palm to strike deals with O2, AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), Telefonica, and Vodafone by the first half of 2010.

Although interest in Palm Pre is accelerating, as evidenced by the RBC/ChangeWave chart below, it still lags behind Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry.

Apple says it sold more than 1 million iPhone 3GSs by the end of its first weekend of sales, 20 times the number Pres sold in its debut. Apple’s number, however, covers three days of sales (vs. the Palm’s two) and includes pre-orders and units shipped to overseas carriers.

See also:

• Analyst: Palm sold about 50,000 Pres
• The Palm Pre’s soggy debut
• Apple to Palm Pre: Drop dead
• Survey: Smartphone demand accelerating
• Ex Apple hardware chief named CEO of Palm

UPDATE: Make that 1 million. See below

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster issued a report early Monday that may draw some attention away from Steve Jobs’ health and put it back on the bright and shiny object Apple (AAPL) released last Friday.

Munster and his team spent the day counting heads and conducting interviews with customers buying the new iPhone 3GS in New York City and Minneapolis. Among their findings:

• 750,000 iPhones. Munster estimates that Apple sold about 750,000 new iPhones over the three-day weekend, 50% more than his initial prediction (500,000) but 25% less than the 1 million iPhone 3Gs Apple sold on launch last July. It took Apple 74 days to sell 1 million first-generation iPhone and three days to sell 1 million units of the iPhone 3G.
• Shrinking windfall. Among the 256 customers surveyed, 28% were switching carriers to AT&T (T), down from 38% last year and 52% in 2007. AT&T’s iPhone windfall is shrinking.
• Brand loyalty. 56% were upgrading from an old iPhone, up from 38% last year. “We believe this shows Apple is developing brand loyalty not enjoyed by other mobile phone makers,” Munster writes.
• 16GB sweet spot. 43% bought the high-end 32GB iPhone 3GS, down from the 66% who bought the high-capacity model (16GB) last year and the 95% who chose 8GB over the 4GB when the first iPhone went on sale.
• Business users. Among customers buying their first iPhone, 12% were switching from a Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry, up from 6% last year. This, says Munster, “may indicate the company is making headway among business users slowly adopting the iPhone platform for corporate use.”

Munster maintains a buy rating for Apple with a price target of $180 a share. The stock closed Friday at 139.48, up 2.6%, before the Street learned that Steve Jobs is recovering from a liver transplant.

UPDATE: Four hours and fifteen minutes after Munster issued his report to clients, Apple announced that it had actually sold more than 1 million units of the iPhone 3GS by Sunday, selling as many iPhones in eight countries as it sold in 21 last year. See here.

See also:

• Munster: 500,000 iPhones this weekend
• Live from the (relatively sedate) iPhone 3G S launch
• Inside Steve Jobs’ liver transplant

Demand for smartphones (as opposed to ordinary cellphones) has never been higher and continues to accelerate, according to a report issued Thursday by RBC Capital and ChangeWave Reseach.

In a note to client, RBC’s Mike Abramsky ticks off four key findings from interviews conducted June 9-15 among 4,100 mostly high-end consumers.

• Interest is high. 14.4% planned to buy a smartphone over the next three months, up from 11.2% in March.
• Apple and Palm lead demand. Interest in buying Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone jumped to 44% (from 30% in March) following the introduction of the 3GS. Interest in Palm (PALM) doubled to 8% (from 4% in March and 1% last December). Interest in buying Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry was still a “healthy” 23%, but down from 37% in March.
• Touchscreens are hot. 43% of prospective smartphone buyers say touchscreens are “very important” to them, up from 33% in September. But users who do a lot of typing still prefer QWERTY keyboards (33%, basically unchanged).
• Who needs TV? Asked in May what they’d be willing to part with, 1,700 respondents in a separate survey made their priorities clear. 44% would give up their TV service, 23% their home phones, 11% their DVD/movie rentals, but only 3% their cellphones.

ChangeWave surveys, according to the company’s literature, are drawn from “a group of 20,000 highly qualified business, technology, and medical professionals — as well as early adopter consumers — who work in leading companies of select industries. They are credentialed professionals who spend their everyday lives on the frontline of technological change.”

Below the fold: The RBC/ChangeWave fever chart of the horse race between Apple, RIM and Palm.

Owners of Apple (AAPL) iPhones who hold down jobs — as opposed, presumably, to those who go to school, are between jobs or live off the proceeds of their trust funds — are more than twice as likely to access the Internet from their phone as working Americans who own Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerries, Palm (PALM), or Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Mobile devices, according to a report issued Friday by Forrester Research.

Based on a mail survey of 61,033 Americans fielded in February and March 2008 — back when iPhones started at $499 (not $99) and had only been available for six months — the study found “a quantitative difference in what working iPhone owners do.”

In particular, the authors found that:

• Working iPhone owners are more than twice as likely to use the mobile Internet. While only 9% of mobile phone owners and 38% of all working smartphone owners access the Internet from their phone at least weekly, a massive 78% of working iPhone owners do so.
• Mobile email and texting are much more common among working iPhone owners. Whereas one in two working smartphone owners sends mobile email at least weekly, more than three in four working iPhone owners do so. And 80% of working iPhone owners text weekly in contrast with 60% of working smartphone owners and 36% of  working mobile phone owners.
• Households that own iPhones spend more on mobile bills than the average mobile household. Working iPhone owners as a group spend $87 on their household mobile phone bills monthly, while all working smartphone households spend $76 and working mobile phone households spend $66 per month.
• Working iPhone owners are twice as likely as all mobile users to go online in public. In addition to home and work, the two most common places to go online, more than a third of working iPhone owners go online outside or in another public place. This is twice as many as all working mobile phone owners (17%) and nine percentage points higher than all working smartphone owners (26%).
• Fifty percent are more likely to read a blog weekly. Twenty-three percent of working iPhone owners read a blog at least weekly, whereas only 16% of working smartphone owners and 11% of working mobile owner owners do so. This blogging difference extends to maintaining a blog as well, where working iPhone owners are almost twice as likely to do so.
• A third are more likely to maintain a social networking profile weekly. Twenty-six percent of working iPhone owners maintain profiles on social networks, while only 19% of working smartphone owners and 14% of working mobile phone owners do.
• Twenty percent are more likely to use instant messaging weekly. Forty-four percent of working iPhone owners uses instant messaging at least weekly versus 37% of working smartphone owners and 24% of all working mobile phone owners.
• More working iPhone owners telecommute and access the network from home. Twenty-eight percent of working iPhone owners telecommute regularly, and 42% regularly access an employer’s network from a computer while at home. This is a greater percentage than is found among working smartphone owners, where only 20% telecommute regularly and 34% access an employer’s network regularly from home.
• Although more connected to work, fewer iPhone owners bring laptops home. Despite this greater tendency to telecommute and access an employer’s network from home, working iPhone owners are less likely to bring a work laptop home (36%) compared with all working smartphone owners (42%).

The full report is available here as a downloadable PDF for $749 — with a three-week money-back guarantee.

Below the fold: A sample graphic showing that iPhone owners are younger and richer than the general smartphone population.

Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM) were the big winners in the first quarter of 2009, according to a report on the mobile phone industry issued by Gartner, Inc. on Wednesday.

Against a backdrop of weakening sales, smartphones — and in particular, touchscreen smartphones — were the exception.

According to Gartner, worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 269.1 million units in 2009 Q1, down 9.4% from 2008. But smartphone sales exceeded 36.4 million units, up 12.7% from the same period last year.

“Much of the smartphone growth during the first quarter of 2009 was driven by touchscreen products, both in midtier and high-end devices,” said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner. “‘Touch for the sake of touch’ was enough of a driver in the midtier space, but tighter integration with applications and services around music, mobile e-mail, and Internet browsing made the difference at the high end of the market.”

Nokia (NOK) and “Others” — which apparently included Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Mobile — were the big losers in the smartphone market. RIM, however, grew its market share nearly 50% year over year, while Apple’s share increased 109%.

See chart below.

Curiously, Gartner reports that Apple shipped 3.938 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2009, while Apple reported selling 3.79 million in the same period. The difference, according to an Apple spokesperson, is that Apple reports the number of iPhones it “shipped in” to its customers, while Gartner estimates “ship through,” and includes the number of units it believes are sitting in inventory.

We got a call Friday from Mike Abramsky who wanted to set the record straight — and crow just a little bit.

Last February we chided Abramsky, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, for seemingly wrong-headed calls on Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM).

Three weeks earlier he had lowered his price target for Apple from $140 to $70 a share — below all the other analysts’ — and raised his RIM target from $45 to $75.

But as luck would have it, Apple ended up climbing 27.5% to just under $100 a share, and RIM, after issuing an earnings warning, fell 14.5% in one day, to below $50 a share.

Those were short-term movements, however, and Abramsky — who has since raised his target on both stocks (Apple to $165, RIM to $90) — was calling to point out that while Apple’s shares have risen an impressive 51% since Jan. 1, RIM’s have done even better, climbing 81% for the year.

“We were wrong about our Apple valuation,” he admits. “But we were right about which stock would outperform the other.”

Abramsky these days is bullish on both companies, and had interesting things to say about what each has in store for this summer and fall.

RIM, he says, has at least a dozen smartphones in the pipeline — mostly extensions of its current lineup reconfigured for release with new carriers.

For example, there are new versions of the BlackBerry Bold and Flip coming to Verizon (VZN), and a version of the Curve 8900, which had a good run with T-Mobile (DT), coming to AT&T (T).

But there’s also the product code-named Pluto that’s half touchscreen and half keyboard, a phone with a slide-out keyboard, and a new version of the touchscreen Storm that has solved the first edition’s awkward typing problems, according to carriers who have seen it.

Apple, by contrast, is sticking with its usual lean and stripped-down product line-up. Abramsky sees no more than three iPhones in Cupertino’s near-term offerings:

• A “pro” iPhone with more memory, a better camera, perhaps a flash, and a host of other improvements users have called for
• A price cut on the current iPhone, to perhaps as low as $99 — which he says could significantly boost the device’s global market share
• A smaller, entry level “nano” iPhone, but not before next year

“It’s not really about Apple versus RIM,” he says. “It’s not a zero sum game.” The two companies have “unique technology skills and focus,” he says, and they appeal to different sets of users.

According to Abramsky, the BlackBerry will continue to draw “productivity centric” users who care about security, push e-mail and what he calls “purpose-driven browsing” (for example, looking up a phone number).

“Media centric” users will tend to prefer the iPhone, which Abramsky describes as “unmatched” in terms of Web browsing, iTunes integration, breadth of applications and general user experience.

Together, he says, Apple and RIM will drive the next wave of mobile handset sales — which he believes have shifted irrevocably from cellphones to smartphones — and continue to take market share from Nokia (NOK) and Motorola (MOT).

“This is almost Apple’s second chance to dominate the industry,” says Abramsky, who has been around long enough to remember how the Mac, once overtaken by Microsoft (MSFT) Windows, never caught up.

“Here in the mobile handset market Apple has such a strong sustainable advantage that one could argue that it will continue to dominate and gain market share.”

So hats off to you, Mr. Abramsky, for owning up to your mistake, for reconsidering your valuations and for imagining markets broad enough to allow both RIM and Apple to prosper.

But for the record, in the four months since you made that Jan. 16 call on Apple, its shares, which closed at $129.19 on Friday, have actually outperformed RIM’s ($73.77). See chart at right.

See also:

• Mike Abramsky’s bad Apple advice
• Mike Abramsky’s bad RIM advice
• Apple’s Q2: Analyzing the analysts

Apple’s (AAPL) shares Monday morning shrugged off bad news to soar past $128.24 share. The iPhone had just been unseated by Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry in NPD’s latest smartphone rankings, but by close of day Apple’s stock had climbed to $132.08, up 3.8% for the day.

What the significance of that $128.24 price point?

That was Apple’s closing price on Friday Sept. 26, 2008. The following Monday, Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty and RBC Capital’s Mike Abramsky turned bearish on Apple. Citing a ChangeWave survey that showed a sharp drop in consumer plans to buy the company’s computers, each downgraded the stock from buy to neutral.

Apple went into freefall. By 10:30 a.m. its shares had dropped 16% — wiping out $18 billion in the company’s market capitalization in the space of 60 minutes. Apple closed at $105.26 that day, down 18% — its worst sell off in eight years.

The stock fell with the rest of the market over the next four months and hit bottom on Jan. 20 at $78.20. It has been outperforming the NASDAQ ever since.

According to Fly On the Wall — which calls Apple’s recent climb a “stealth rally” — resistance levels to watch are at $130.00, $132.20 and $134.79. Support is at $127.50.

RIM, meanwhile, closed at $74.3, up 2.77% for the day. RBC’s Abramsky raised his price target from to $90 from $80 following positive comments from RIM management.

See also

• Why Apple shares took a nosedive
• The survey that squashed Apple
• The survey that squashed Apple – Part 2

In the dog days of summer last year, when balky downloads in cities across the U.S. were slowing iPhones to a crawl, Wired.com’s Gadget Lab launched a survey of 3G network speeds to try to pinpoint the problem.

Gadget Lab invited iPhone owners all over the world to run a simple network test and submit their findings electronically.

After collating the results from 2,636 users — 62% of them in the U.S. — Wired concluded that the fault lay not with Apple’s (AAPL) device, but with the U.S. carrier it had chosen to partner with, AT&T (T). See the results here.

Now, following rumors that Apple has been talking with Verizon (VZ), the Gadget Lab has decided to give it another try.

On Monday, it launched a second Battle of the Carriers, this time testing all the major U.S. carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint (S) and T-Mobile (DT) — and other 3G smartphones, including Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry.

The exercise only takes a few minutes. The instructions, available here, are fairly straightforward: you go to a Wired website on your phone, take the test, and then record your results on an interactive Zeemap. Just remember to click the “details” tab before you submit your entry, or else you end up — as I did the first time — sticking a blank entry on the map.

Below the fold: The 2008 results in map form.

No analyst we know of correctly predicted Apple’s (AAPL) second fiscal quarter results for 2009, in which the company proved that computer makers don’t have to slash prices or build “junky” $400 netbooks to weather an economic storm. But some analysts did better than others.

Who did best?

Let’s look at the numbers. The table below represents the estimates of all the Wall Street analysts whose numbers we could get our hands on, as well as those of three of the most prominent blogger analysts. (We could have included lots more bloggers; everybody these days seems to have an Apple earnings spreadsheet in their hard drive.)

In our chart, the actual results and the most accurate estimates are highlighted in green. The worst estimates are highlighted in red. There were several ties.

The professionals and the bloggers scored roughly the same — which in itself tells you something. As usual, the bloggers were more bullish than the pros, but this quarter Apple’s actual results in most categories blew past even the most optimistic of the bulls.

It will pain some readers to hear this, given his bottom-of-the-barrel target for Apple’s shares ($95), but the blue ribbon goes once again to Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital, usually considered a Research in Motion (RIMM) bull and an Apple bear. He scored two greens and no reds this quarter. (Last quarter, when his price target was $70, he beat the field with three greens.) [UPDATE: CNBC's Jim Goldman reports that Abramsky reversed himself after that earnings report and has now slapped a $165 per share target on Apple.]

Tied for second place are Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster and Financial Alchemist’s Turley Muller, with two greens and one red apiece. Muller gets the edge in our book because he  hit so close and Munster missed so badly — and inexplicably — on Apple’s earnings per share.

Yair Reiner gets special mention for having nailed that surprising high iPhone unit sales number (3.8 million).

In the department of strange bedfellows, Andy Zaky of Bullish Cross — who never tires of berating the professional analysts for misunderstanding Apple, and has often singled out Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty for special opprobrium — ended up tied with Huberty in the iPod division, missing the actual number by nearly 500,000 units, but coming closer than anyone else in our chart.

And we can’t close without pointing out that among very worst predictions for the quarter were those offered by Apple COO Peter Oppenheimer, whose guidance numbers missed actual revenue by $360 million and EPS by $0.33 to $0.43 a share. Talk about conservative guidance!

For those readers who submitted estimates that I didn’t include here, you know who you are. Feel free to reiterate them in the comments.

Apple’s detailed earnings results are available in its press release. An audio webcast of the earnings call with analysts is available here and Seeking Alpha has published a transcript.

Barron’s Eric Savitz has published a round-up of analyst reactions to the earnings report — including Abramsky’s upgrade — here.

See also:

• Live from Apple’s Q2 earnings call
• 5 key quotes from Apple’s earnings call
• Apple’s Q2: A test of fundamentals
• Apple Q1 earnings: Analyzing the analysts

In the early days of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, when corporate IT managers were taking their first close look at the device (and wondering whether it would find a place in their organizations alongside Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry), few documents were more influential than the Forrester Research report entitled “The iPhone Is Not Meant For Enterprises.”

Released on Dec. 12, 2007, the six-page, $749 report was better known by its subtitle: “The Top 10 Reasons Why We Recommend That IT Not Support It.”

It was a devastating critique that savaged the iPhone from its virtual keyboard to its non-removable battery, and it triggered flame wars all across the Internet. (The comment stream on Apple 2.0’s summary, available here, is 138 messages long.)

Which makes it all the more notable that Forrester’s second look at the device,  published last week, is so laudatory.

This one is called “Making iPhone Work In The Enterprise: Early Lessons Learned,” and it reports on the experience of IT managers at three firms that managed to fit the iPhone into their operations: Kraft Foods (KFT), Oracle (ORCL) and Amylin Pharmaceuticals (AMLN).

This report, too, is dominated by lists, starting with the top four reasons iPhones are good for business:

1. Employees like them. “In this era of Technology Populism, where consumer IT is often better than enterprise IT, it sometimes just makes sense to give employees the freedom to choose the tools they want.”
2. They make mobile collaboration easier. “As anybody with experience on both iPhones and BlackBerry will tell you, the Internet feels natural on an iPhone and a like a chore on a BlackBerry.”
3. iPhone users need less hand-holding. “All three firms have set up wikis so that employees can support each other. ‘Our early adopters sometimes teach things we’d rather our iPhone users not know, but overall they provide better support than we can,’ said one person we interviewed.”
4. They can be cheaper in the long run. “In at least one case, an iPhone adopter found that the data plans for previous mobile devices were more expensive than the consumer plans AT&T is offering for iPhones. This company was able to reset its baseline plan pricing 30% lower for all phones because it supported iPhone.”

This document represents a remarkable turnaround for Forrester (FORR), an organization that carries a lot of sway with IT managers and has often been hostile to Apple products.

Not this time. The introduction to the report starts like this:

“Apple is redefining its third industry: first the computer industry, next the music industry, and now the mobile industry. … The iPhone’s intuitive interface, superior browsing experience, and rapidly evolving developer tool kit make content-centric applications far more appealing on an iPhone than on a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device. While BlackBerry is still the email and calendaring winner, iPhone devotees do make the shift to typing on glass.”

Of course there are caveats, and these too come in lists.

There are the top four iPhone “challenges,” including the dearth of management tools, the lack of full support for VPN and the “usual litany” of “annoying” early-generation glitches (e.g., lack of cut-and-paste and click-to-call).

And there are seven “recommendations” (launch in stages, negotiate with AT&T (T), let employees buy their iPhones at the Apple Store, etc.).

And finally, there are seven things that should be better when iPhone OS 3.o arrives, including (finally) cut-and-paste, encrypted back-up and “new policy capabilities,” such as the ability to disable the iPhone’s camera to discourage corporate espionage.

The full report is 13 pages long and can be downloaded here for $749.

See also:

• Top 10 reasons IT won’t support the iPhone
• Gartner flips its iPhone bozo bit, gives IT the green light