Touchscreen phones are on fire, comScore reports, and Apple is leading the pack. For now.

Three months ending Aug. 2009. Source: comScore MobiLens

There's a thundering herd of imitators behind it, but Apple's (AAPL) iPhone still dominates that fastest-growing segment of the U.S. smartphone market, according to a comScore report issued Tuesday.

Touchscreen mobile phone adoption in the U.S. grew at a breakneck 159% rate last year, comScore reports, easily outpacing the 63% growth of the broader smartphone market.

By last August, nearly 34 million Americans were carrying smartphones, 23.8 million of them touchscreen devices. And of those touchscreen phones, 32.9% were iPhones.

“The iPhone clearly set the trend in the industry for touchscreen devices, so it’s no surprise that it has the largest share of the market,” said comScore VP Mark Donovan. “But as other players have entered the touchscreen market with compelling devices, competition is clearly heating up.”

Donovan mentioned Google's (GOOG) Android platform in particular, although the closest Android contender in August was the T-Mobile (DT) G1 running a distant seventh after two proprietary LG phones, the BlackBerry (RIMM) Storm, the Palm (PALM) Pre and the Samsung Instinct.

Below the fold, comScore's spreadsheets, including one that shows preference by age group. (The smartphone sweet spot seems to be ages 24 to 34.)

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IT departments are finally starting to buy Apple's smartphone, says a Deutsche Bank report

Click to enlarge. Source: Deutsche Bank

"There is growing evidence that the iPhone is making inroads into the Enterprise," writes Deutsche Bank research analyst Chris Whitmore in a report to clients Monday.

According to his estimates, Apple (AAPL) by the end of the year will have shipped about 2 million iPhones into corporate accounts through various routes, including internal IT department purchases and formal reimbursement policies.

That would give Apple about a 7% share of the enterprise smartphone market this year, up from 2% in 2008.

IT departments were famously resistant to the iPhone when it was launched two years ago. That resistance has begun to melt, writes Whitmore, for several reasons:

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Apple gains, RIM drifts, Palm holds steady in the latest ChangeWave survey

Source: ChangeWave

Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, with a 40% share, is still the most popular smartphone among the 4,255 owners who responded to a ChangeWave survey in September. But Apple's (AAPL) iPhone is gaining fast, according to research director Paul Carton.

"Apple (30%) has seen a huge market share jump since the previous survey," he writes in a release issued Tuesday. "Not only has the iPhone 3GS release enabled them to gain 5-pts overall — for the first time it has also placed them within striking distance of the number one spot in the consumer market."

Palm (PALM) remains far behind at 7%, Carton notes, but adds that "this is the first survey in nearly two years where their share hasn’t fallen – and that’s a clearly encouraging sign."

ChangeWave surveys are often dismissed as unrepresentative — which they are. But in this case, the so-called ChangeWave Alliances' 20,000 professionals "who spend their everyday lives on the frontline of technological change," according to its website, represent the sweet spot of RIM's and Palm's target market.

For more results — good and bad — from the survey, see the charts below the fold.

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Consumers and business users alike prefer it over the BlackBerry

Photo: J.D. Power

Here's a bullet point you can expect to see at Steve Jobs' next keynote.

Apple's (AAPL)  iPhone has once again come in first in J.D. Power's semi-annual customer satisfaction study, despite a battery that continues to disappoint.

Apple increased its score in both the consumer and business user portions of the survey.

Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry was No. 2 among business users and No. 3, after Apple and LG, among consumers.

More broadly, the survey found:

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Daniel Eran Dilger finds anti-Apple bias in Gartner's research

"Looking into its crystal ball, Gartner Group has predicted that Google’s Android will become the second largest smartphone platform by 2012," writes Daniel Eran Dilger in the one-man blog he grandly calls Roughly Drafted Magazine. "Problem is, nobody’s talking about how terrible Gartner is at predicting things, or that Gartner’s 'research' has historically been paid for by special interests."

So begins Dilger's reaction to an interview with Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney that appeared Tuesday in Computerworld and was picked up uncritically by more than half a dozen tech websites.

Drawing on historical records and making generous use of internal Microsoft documents made public during antitrust proceedings, Dilger attacks not only Dulaney's numbers, but the credibility of the entire Gartner research group.

The result is a 1,700-word screed that may be the most thorough take-down of a tech industry analyst — and his employer — since Eliot Spitzer went after Henry Blodget.

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Company wants to make its Flash technology available everywhere — and that means penetrating mobile devices.

Flash is coming to most mobile phones - except the one that starts with "i." Image: Adobe

Flash is finally coming to your smartphone—and so is Adobe (ADBE). With today's launch of the newest version its software, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, the San Jose-based company is making an aggressive push to get its product onto any gadget that allows for web browsing–Blackberry devices, netbooks, increasingly even TVs.

Crucially, Adobe has signed on a number of key launch partners for the product including Google (GOOG) and Research in Motion (RIMM). By the first half of next year, consumers can expect Flash on nearly every smartphone operating system including Google’s Android, Nokia’s (NOK) Symbian, Palm’s (PALM) webOS and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile.

This is great for developers, who have long had to use different software to make their applications work on different devices. And it’s even better for consumers, for whom web browsing will get faster and more consistent regardless of the device. More

Source: AdMob

Apple (AAPL) now has a substantial — if not the largest — share of the smartphone market in every region of the world except Asia and Africa, according to a report issued Wednesday by AdMob.

Overall, the iPhone's worldwide share grew to 40% from 33% over the last six months. In North America, its share of the smartphone market is 52%, as measured by hits on AdMob's ads.

AdMob, which bills itself as the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace, delivers ads displayed on smartphone screens, so its statistics tends to favor phones heavily used for Web surfing. "AdMob does not claim that this information will be necessarily representative of the mobile Web as a whole or of any particular country market," it warns at the bottom of the report. "AdMob’s traffic is driven by publisher relationships and may be influenced accordingly."

Among the report's other findings: More

User-generated video goes mobile – and live

Ramu Sunkara was at home in Silicon Valley three years ago, chatting with a friend in Moscow, when inspiration struck. He didn’t just want to hear about his friend

Sunkara: inspired by a Moscow snow frolic. Photo: Qik

playing in the snow with his kids. He wanted to see it, live.

Now he can. Soon after that phone conversation, Sunkara and two friends started Qik (pronounced "quick"), a company whose software lets cell phones broadcast video live to the Internet.

Today, Qik and other mobile video services are still in their infancy. But consumers finally have an excuse to try them, now that they have access to 3G networks and a new crop of video-equipped smartphones. According to Nielsen VideoCensus, Qik has so far attracted just a tiny audience, though its popularity seems to have spiked recently. Since its iPhone app began working over 3G networks in August, viewers have stayed on the site six times longer.

"When we launched, only two phones were capable of doing live video," says Sunkara, Qik's CEO. "Now practically every new phone can."

Cell phone video in general is a fast-growing category. Google (GOOG) says that YouTube's cell phone video uploads increased fivefold just a week after the release of the latest video-capable iPhones (AAPL). Facebook has begun adding video capture to its cell phone apps. And sites like Ustream and Flixwagon are experimenting in the same live mobile video niche where Qik is making a name for itself. More

Our correspondent goes to a geekfest and reports back on five new tools you need now.

Catch that mouse. Logitech's Performance Mouse MX is one to love. Photo: Logitech

I was in gadgetry heaven.

The Pepcom Holiday Spectacular in New York Thursday night was buzzing — and it wasn't just the sensation of mobile devices on vibrate mode.

With 80 companies — from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)  to Samsung — showing off their goods for the holiday season, the room pulsated with enthusiasm, competitiveness and innovation. It was like the recession didn't exist!

I can't go through everything I saw, but here are my top five picks of the most interesting, unique technology solutions for business (and then some honorable mentions). More