The momentum has shifted in the battle for smartphone supremacy, according to the results of a ChangeWave survey of 3,803 cell phone owners released Monday.

Measured by market share, Apple's (AAPL) iPhone continues what research director Paul Carton characterizes as "explosive growth." Apple's slice of the consumer smartphone market is now 23%, having grown 6 points since September and more than doubled since the introduction of the iPhone 3G in June.

Research in Motion's (RIMM) market share, meanwhile, has leveled off, while Palm's (PALM) seems to be circling the drain. See the chart below:

The picture going forward, however, looks very different. The ChangeWave survey was conducted between Dec. 9 and Dec. 15 — following the release of a slew of new BlackBerry products that culminated in the Storm, RIM's answer to the touchscreen iPhone.

When the participants who planned to purchase a smartphone over the next three months were asked which kind they hoped to get, 39% said a BlackBerry — up 9 points from September. Meanwhile, the wave of enthusiasm that greeted the iPhone 3G seems to have settled down; today, only 30% plan to buy an Apple smartphone, down 4 points from September and 26 points from June's peak. See below:

"So as we approach the 1st Quarter," Carton writes, "the ball has shifted back into BlackBerry’s court."

But there's an important difference between the iPhone's spike in interest last June and the BlackBerry Storm's December surge.

iPhone users, on the whole, have been extremely satisfied with their new toys. Storm owners are considerably less so.

For comparison purposes, Carton has stacked the Storm's favorability ratings against the original 2G iPhone, using results from a July 2007 survey taken less than a month after the iPhone's initial release.

As the chart below shows, the original iPhone — with all its flaws — drew a "very satisfied" rating (77%) that was more than double the BlackBerry Storm's (33%). More importantly, says Carton, the Storm's "unsatisfied" rating (14%) is three times higher than that of the original iPhone (5%).

Carton also notes that 4% of new Storm buyers report that they've already returned or exchanged their unit or are "very likely" to return it. Another 7% say they are "somewhat likely" to return or exchange.

"A key question for RIM," Carton concludes, "is whether their new BlackBerry products are strong enough to capitalize on the increased consumer interest."

From the Changewave Alliance Web site:

ChangeWave runs a proprietary network of 20,000 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)

Here's bit of upbeat economic news to brighten a gloomy Monday.

On Aug. 1, a London-based investor who calls himself "Tommo_UK" posted a message on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board asking anyone who had bought an iPhone 3G to provide three pieces of data: the serial number (with a few digits X'd out), the date of purchase, and the first 13 digits of the so-called IMEI number.

The International Mobile Equipment Identity is a unique 15 digit number assigned to every cell phone when it is manufactured and can be found on the back of the box in which the iPhone is packaged. Tommo_UK's plan was to gather enough IMEIs to decipher the meaning of those digits and determine Apple's production rate. To get things rolling he offered his own: 01 161200 06652xx, purchased on July 11, the day the iPhone 3G was launched. (link)

Two months later, the TMO's Apple Finance Board — with a lot of help from a member of Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board who calls himself "howlongtoretire" — has gathered IMEIs on nearly 150 iPhone 3Gs and published them in a big Google docs spreadsheet here. The most recent entry: a 8 GB black iPhone manufactured on Sept. 29 and purchased on Oct. 4 that was, according to its IMEI, the 9,190,680th iPhone 3G built this year.

Writing in Bullish Cross on Monday, Andy Zaky and Turley Muller have used this data to make some bold predictions about what Apple is going to say when it releases its quarterly earnings report later this month.

They acknowledge that even if Apple has built more than 9 million iPhones, that doesn't mean they have all been sold. Some of those devices may have been defective. Some may be sitting in inventory on store shelves or loading docks.

But taking all that into account, Zaky and Muller conclude that Apple has probably sold considerably more iPhones last quarter than even the Street's most bullish analysts anticipate. Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, for example, predicted on Sept. 22 that Apple would sell 5 million iPhones in its fourth quarter, which ended five days later. (link)

Zaky and Muller's bottom line:

"even if a whopping 1.5 million iPhones of the total IMEI registered devices are unsold as of today, an unlikely assumption, it would still put 3G iPhone sales at 7.6 million units." (link)

Why is 7.6 million significant? Because coming into its fourth quarter, Apple had already sold 2.42 million first-generation iPhones. So if Tommo_UK's IMEI data can be trusted and if Zaky and Muller's analysis is correct, Apple (AAPL) has reached its oft-stated goal of selling at least 10 million iPhones in 2008 with three months to spare.

Steve Jobs waited until the end of his keynote address on Tuesday to announce the news that iPhone owners had been waiting for: a software update with fixes for the device's many bugs.

"It's a big update," he promised as he ticked off the benefits of  iPhone 2.1: fewer dropped calls, improved battery life, dramatically faster back-ups, new performance enhancements and – he added three times for good measure – "it fixes a lot of bugs."

The update arrived as promised Friday morning, and with the exception of a few wished-for improvements that didn't materialize – turn-by-turn GPS support, landscape viewing of e-mail and cut-and-paste chief among them -  it seems to have delivered the goods.

"It is much faster overall," wrote "ghostface147" on a forum at AppleInsider, speaking for many who followed. "No scrolling lag, faster opening SMS and Safari seems snappier."

In fact, the adjective "snappier" was used so often that it became a running joke – in part because the same term was used to describe iPhone 2.02, the software update released in August that left so many bugs unfixed.

"Here at Ars [Technica]," wrote Jacqui Cheng, in her review of the latest security improvements, "we like to think of [2.1] as the 'make the iPhone stop sucking' update." (link)

But that doesn't do it justice. The performance enhancements Jobs promised are real: apps load faster; backups that used to go on for many minutes are over in seconds; long contact lists that seemed to take forever to load pop up almost instantaneously; and so far, app crashes do seem less frequent.

There are also some nifty software improvements, the most significant being the so-called Genius feature. Unveiled on Tuesday on the iPod nano and touch, it lets iPhone owners find tunes that go well together and create compatible playlists on the fly. One caveat: the Genius icon won't appear until the iPhone has been re-synced (see here).

Overall, the early reviews, while somewhat grudging, are almost universally positive.

"We'll need to take some more time to finish testing the battery and phone call reliability," writes David Chartier at Ars Technica, "but after our early experience with the new software, we're confident enough to tentatively remove the beta badge and say that the iPhone OS 2.0 may have finally arrived." (link)

Below the fold: Apple's official list of the improvements in iPhone 2.1 Software Update.

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According to AT&T, the outage that took down a major data network across much of the northeastern United States overnight Wednesday was brand agnostic — any wireless device using its EDGE network was affected.

But by all accounts, it was mostly iPhone users who complained — vociferously — in e-mail messages, in Twitter postings, on Apple and AT&T forums.

At DSLReports.com, where many of the early complaints were posted, there were message from the occasional BlackJack II and Nokia N95 user. But headline was "iPhone Users Greeted With Morning Outage," and that's who weighed in the loudest.

"This is insanity," wrote "WildGod" at 10:23 a.m. from Brooklyn. "I never thought I would miss Verizon and my Treo as much as I do now." (link)

iPhone owners, of course, make more demands on their cellphones than most users. But they also have a long history of complaints against AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive U.S. carrier since June 2007, for slow and often inconsistent service.

Last week in San Diego, the second class action suit in as many weeks was filed against Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) for failing to deliver the "twice as fast" network speeds promised in the iPhone 3G promotional material. (See here and here.) The latest suit draws heavily on reports suggesting that heavy iPhone use is pulling more power from AT&T's antennas than its network is prepared to provide. See Roughly Drafted for more detail.

According to AT&T spokesman Brad Mays, last night's outage was caused by a "routing issue" that affected "some wireless data," but not voice calling, text messaging or Blackberry e-mail.

Service was restored by 11:56 a.m. EDT.

On Saturday, Aug. 30, the daughters of "BillH" bought an iPhone at an AT&T store in Sunnyvale, Calif. The next day, their father, an Apple investor from Minneapolis, reported on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board (AFB) that the so-called IMEI number on the phone was 01 171400 6049xx x (the last three digits X'd out for safety sake).

That number may not mean anything to you or me, but to a group of Apple watchers, it represents a significant milestone — and a sign that iPhone sales may be running significantly ahead of forecasts.

In a joint project of AFB and Investor Village's AAPL Sanity board, several members have been collecting the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) numbers of every iPhone 3G they can get their hands on and recording them on a big Google speadsheet here.

By tracking the sequence of IMEIs, they can now say, with a fair degree of certainty, that as of Aug. 30, when BillH's daughters bought that phone, Apple had manufactured at least 5,649,000 iPhone 3Gs. Added to the 2.4 million first-generation iPhones the company reported it had sold in the first six months of 2008, that means that Apple has manufactured more than 8 million iPhones this year.

Moreover, with Apple's overseas partners reportedly turning out iPhones at the rate of 800,000 units per week, it seems likely that Apple will build — if not sell — its 10 millionth iPhone before the end of September.

Apple (AAPL) has said repeatedly that it hopes to sell 10 million iPhones in calendar 2008. It looks like the company may meet that goal with several months to spare.

In 2007, Apple sold 3.71 million iPhones.

Source: Net Applications

The iPhone's growing presence on the Web, having leveled off before the introduction of the iPhone 3G, surged in the month and a half since, according to preliminary data released Sunday by Net Applications, an Aliso Viejo, CA-based Web service company.

The percentage of Web hits coming from iPhones passed 0.2% in June and then dipped in the weeks that followed. But it peaked on August 23rd at a record high 0.48%, according to the new data, before drifting back last week.

Net Applications' brief report, issued in advance of its August survey of operating system market share data, offered no explanation for last week's fall-off, but it did attribute the jump in July and August to the flood of iPhones 3Gs sold by Apple (AAPL) and its partners since the device's July 11 launch.

[In its August survey, released early Monday, Net Applications reported that the iPhone's share of global Web usage increased 58% in the course of the month, climbing from 0.19% in July to 0.30% in August. In other words, one out of every 333 Web hits in August came from an iPhone. See here.]

The iPhone has cast an oversize shadow on the Internet from the moment the original model was introduced in late June 2007. By the time Net Applications issued its July 2007 survey, the iPhone already represented 0.04% of the visits to websites operated by the firm's clients. That's more than double what one would expect, given that there were about 1.4 billion computers connected to the Internet at that point, according to Internet World Stats, and only 270,000 or so were iPhones.

You can see the latest data at the New Applications website here. The company's surveys are based on data collected from the browsers of visitors — some 160 million per month — to its customers websites.

In the August survey issued Monday, the iPhone OS, with a 0.30% share, was the fourth-most popular operating system on the Web after Windows (90.69%), Mac OS (7.84%) and Linux (0.92%).

If you're getting bad reception on your iPhone 3G, blame your carrier, not your iPhone.

That's the conclusion Wired.com's Gadget Lab draws from a survey of 4,200 iPhone 3G owners. The results, posted Monday morning, show marked regional differences that Wired.com believes are primarily due to the maturity — or lack thereof — of the local 3G network, and not some underlying problem in Apple's (AAPL) hardware.

The study, which invited users to measure their local 3G speeds and enter the data on an interactive map, was less than scientific. The participants were self-selected and a third of them provided data so incomplete the information was unusable.

But the 2,636 data points that were usable — and which Wired.com plotted on a Google map of the world — offer a window into the nature of the iPhone bandwidth problem that has drawn so many complaints.

The most striking differences in 3G reception emerged when the study compared the United States with Europe. Users in Germany and the Netherlands reported the world's fastest average 3G download speeds — about 2,000 Kbps. The most "0" results — indicating no 3G signal whatsoever — came from users in the United States.

Other results from the survey:

• European T-Mobile (DT) users reported the fastest 3G download speeds: 1,822 Kbps on average. [Wired notes that Europe has some of the most mature 3G networks, which have been in development since 2001. AT&T (T), by contrast, introduced its 3G network in the United States in 2004.]
• Canadian carriers Rogers (RCI) and Fido tied for second fastest with an average download speed of about 1,330 Kbps on average.
• U.S. carrier AT&T tied for third with Telstra (Australia), Telia (Sweden) and Softbank (Japan), where users reported average download speeds of roughly 990 Kbps.
• Australian carriers Optus and Virgin users reported the slowest speeds of about 390 Kbps on average.

The survey also shows striking differences from one neighborhood to another. Manhattan's Rockefeller Center and upper Fifth Ave. got very strong signals, for example, while coverage in the rest of the city was spotty. [Reception in my Brooklyn neighborhood was reported to be particularly weak, which jibes with first-hand experience.]

One explanation for the poor bandwidth in metropolitan areas like New York and San Francisco is offered by Dave Nowicki, developer of the femtocell, a technology that extends the reach of wireless networks. He suggests that although these cities are richly supplied with 3G antennas, they are also the places where the most iPhone users reside, resulting in overloaded networks and pokey bandwidth.

This is a problem, Wired.com concludes, that won't be easy for Apple to fix:

In our view, this data is a strong indicator that performance of the mobile carrier's network is affecting the iPhone 3G more than the handset itself. This also furthers our thesis that it's highly unlikely that Apple is going to wave a magical wand and say, "3G problems, be gone," with a software update. Before Apple can make such a claim, it needs to wait for all of its carriers to optimize 3G network behavior — in terms of number of towers, how they're positioned and how much bandwidth each tower can handle. (link)

To see the results from your city or town, click here and zoom in until the blue dots resolve into bar graphs.

A real queue: NYC two weeks after launch

Queues — some real, some made for hire — formed outside cellphone stores in 21 countries Friday as Apple executed the second major overseas roll-out of the iPhone 3G.

The scale of Friday's operation, which reached from India and Singapore to Colombia and Argentina, was almost lost in the news that some of the eager "customers" lining up in Warsaw were actors paid by the mobile carrier Orange to hide the fact that demand for the iPhone is considerably weaker overseas than it was in the U.S. (link)

How important was the launch? According to a report to clients issued Friday by Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, Apple (AAPL) enlarged the iPhone's potential market 78% in one swoop — a fact he says has not been factored into the company's share price.

After the 7/11 launch, the iPhone 3G was available in 22 countries with, by Munster's calculation, a combined cellphone subscriber base of 370.5 million customers.

The 21 countries Apple added on Friday boast a total cellphone subscriber base of of 290 million, increasing the iPhone's reach to 43 countries and 660.5 million potential customers.

Earlier Friday, several news outlets reported that three Russian carriers, with 144 million subscribers, have agreed to sell the iPhone this year, perhaps as early as October.

Of course, nobody knows how many of those potential subscribers will actually buy iPhones. Apple's only publicly stated goal is that it hopes to capture 1% of the worldwide market in calendar year 2008, which would require selling 10 million iPhones by December 31. Many analysts believe Apple may sell that many before the end of September.

"We believe shares of AAPL will trade on iPhone unit volumes for the next several quarters," Munster wrote, "so we expect the iPhone unit upside to be a positive catalyst for the stock."

Below: Munster's list of the 21 countries where the iPhone began selling on Friday, with their subscriber base.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has upped his estimate of the number of iPhones he expects Apple to sell in its 4th quarter, from 4.1 million to 4.47 million, according to a report to clients issued early Wednesday.

In the same period last year, Apple (AAPL) sold 1.12 million first-generation iPhones.

Munster's new estimate is based 1) on Apple's report that it sold 1 million iPhone 3Gs in the three days following the device's July 11 launch and 2) on 25 hours of in-store checks across the United States conducted over the past two weeks.

His team counted sales in both flagship and "regular" Apple stores and concluded that Apple sold an average of 95 units a day in each of its 188 U.S. stores over the next 27 days. He combined these results with estimates of the number of iPhones sold at AT&T's 2,200 outlets and the number sold by overseas carriers to get a grand total of 4.47 million.

On Tuesday, Fortune.com reported on the findings of an independent analyst, Michael Cote of the Cote Collaborative, who estimates that 3 million units were purchased worldwide during the iPhone 3G's first 30 days on the market. (link)

Piper Jaffray's estimate is probably conservative, says Munster, because it doesn't take into account iPhone sales in the 22 additional countries scheduled to start carrying the iPhone on Aug. 22. Moreover, he reduced to 31 his estimate of the number of iPhones sold per day for the remaining 51 days in the quarter, which ends on Sept. 30, based on a 10% falloff in sales his team observed between the first week of observation and the second.

The charts below summarize his findings:

In a move that will significantly expand its retail presence in time for the holiday season, Apple has agreed to let retailing giant Best Buy sell the new iPhone 3G through its nationwide chain of Best Buy Mobile outlets starting early next month.

Best Buy markets cell phones in the United States through 970 full-size stores and 16 stand-alone Best Buy Mobile shops. All U.S. Best Buy stores will carry the iPhone except for a handful of outlets located in areas where AT&T does not provide cell phone coverage.

The deal, first reported on Tuesday by Apple Insider and confirmed by Best Buy Mobile president Shawn Score (see here), could serve both companies well.

For Apple (AAPL), which has been struggling to meet the extraordinary demand for its second-generation iPhone through its smaller network of Apple and AT&T retail stores, the deal puts its hottest-selling product in the hands of one of world's savviest retailers. Best Buy, a Fortune 100 company, is the world's largest consumer electronics retailer, with a 21% share of the U.S. electronics market and a 3.6% share of the cell phone market, up from 2% last year.

For Best Buy (BBY), which has been angling for the iPhone business for more than a year, the deal will add Apple's cachet to its expanding smartphone offerings and help drive traffic to new Best Buy Mobile departments within its stores. Best Buy is aggressively marketing a variety of smartphones, from RIM (RIMM) BlackBerry Curves to Palm (PALM) Treos, and is the exclusive reseller, with Sprint (S), of the Samsung Instinct, one of the iPhone's nearest competitors.

Apple and Best Buy have been slowly expanding their relationship since the retailer began carrying iPods in 2002. Best Buy started selling Macs in selected stores in 2006, and recently expanded the program to more than 600 outlets.

The deal can be seen as a victory for Best Buy's "consumer centricity" marketing strategy, by which it caters to the needs of specific types of customers in specialty boutiques within its full-size stores. Last week Best Buy announced that it had completed a nationwide roll out of its Best Buy Mobile store-within-stores, a joint venture with Britain's CarPhone Warehouse that began in 2006 and has led, according to Best Buy, to a 10-fold increase, year-over-year, in high-end multimedia phone purchases (link).

Best Buy, based in Richfield, Minnesota, operates more than 1,150 stores in the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, China, Mexico and Turkey. Earlier this year it purchased a half-share of CarPhone Warehouse, which has 2,400 outlets in nine European countries.

Apple operates 219 stores, 187 of them in the United States, where customers have been queuing up for the iPhone 3G since early July. AT&T (T) sells iPhones in some 2,000 stores, but the current waiting period for customers who want to buy one from AT&T is 7 to 10 days.