Apple's (AAPL) iPhone took first place in J.D. Power's 2009 smartphone consumer satisfaction survey released Thursday.

The iPhone ranked highest in every category except battery life, where it was tied for last place with Motorola (MOT).

Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, by contrast, scored highest in battery life but ran with the middle of the pack in the other categories (physical design, ease of operation, features, operating system and overall satisfaction).

The survey was conducted between July and December 2008 among 2,648 smartphone users. Apple scored 791 on a scale of 1,000.

In a separate survey of 15,270 owners of traditional mobile phones, LG did best, followed closely by Sony Ericsson.

The iPhone's nearest competitors were two phones running on Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile: LG and Samsung. They were followed by HTC, running Google's (GOOG) Android. RIM, Palm (PALM) and Motorola brought up the rear.

Below: The smartphone consumer satisfaction summary. Individual scores below the fold.

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UPDATE: To see what will and won't be in the new iPhone OS when it's released this summer, you can read our summary here or follow our link to the Quicktime video here.

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The first thing to remember about Apple's (AAPL) iPhone 3.0 special event, announced last Thursday and scheduled for Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m PT), is that it has been billed as "an advance preview."

That means no new software — and certainly no new hardware — is likely to be released to the public today. What Apple is hosting an invitation-only event for developers so they can learn about a new iPhone SDK (software development kit) and get a sneak peek at the third major build of the iPhone's basic operating system.

Steve Jobs hosted a similar event on March 6, 2008 — the "iPhone Software Roadmap" — at which he released a beta version of the first SDK and previewed iPhone 2.0. Both represented major advances over the original iPhone, but end users didn't see the benefits until four months later, with the release of the iPhone 3G and the launch of the App Store on July 11, 2008. iPhone 2.0 introduced dozens of enhancements (and more than a few problems), but the most important advance turned out to be the SDK and the tens of thousands of third-party iPhone applications it has since spawned.

So what can we expect from Tuesday's event?

Most of the advance speculation has centered on iPhone 3.0. Among the new features rumored or expected — but, remember, not necessarily available right away — are:

• Copy and paste. Better two years late than never, according to multiple sources. See, for example, here and here.
• Push notification. So Facebook, say, could alert you when you have a new message. This was promised in June 2008, but not yet delivered.
• MMS — Multimedia Messaging Service. So you can forward those pictures sent to you by friends with far less sophisticated cell phones. Maybe yes, maybe no.
• Better mail program. Why can't you search past messages? Read them in landscape mode? Delete them en masse?
• Internet sharing. For those times when your iPhone has access but your laptop doesn't. Apple and AT&T have both said so-called "tethering" is coming real soon now.
• Bluetooth support. Currently available only for phone headsets. Could be expanded to support wireless keyboards, speaker systems, file exchanges, syncing etc.
• Flash support. So you'd see videos and dancing advertisements instead of those little blue cubes. Adobe (ADBE) says its Flash Player software is ready and waiting for Apple's approval.
• Better App management. The current interface is barely capable of organizing 148 applications, never mind 28,000.
• Voice dialing and turn-by-turn directions. Quick, before iPhone users cause any more traffic accidents.
• Video capture. It can be done without modifying the built-in camera as iPhone Video Recorder, an application available only for jailbroken iPhones, has shown.
• A new browser. The current version of iPhone Safari is nearly two years old and starting to get a little long in the tooth.

Owners of competing smartphones snicker when they read these lists; Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile and Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry have had many of these features for years. According to one report, Apple's primary motivation for introducing the improvements now is to head off competition from the forthcoming Palm (PALM) Pre.

But what none of the competing smartphones have is an SDK that's as easy to use as Apple's or an App Store that makes marketing and distributing applications so painless — and profitable.

Which is why the first part of Tuesday's event — the opportunity for developers to learn about the new SDK — may turn out to be the more significant.

As Seth Weintraub notes in his widely circulated Computerworld blog, developers are going to need some lead time if Apple plans to introduce a new piece of mobile hardware — an Apple tablet, as he suggests, or a more advanced iPhone or iPod touch.

Much less has been written about what that new SDK might include (and most of it is pretty technical), but among the improvements developers are looking for are:

• Better syncing between apps. So those 28,000 applications could share data among themselves.
• Better calendar and t0-do list support. So an e-mail invitation could be automatically added to your iCal.
• More background operation. So you could check your e-mail, for example, without interrupting that Internet radio show you were listening to.

After that, the requests quickly go over this reporter's head. Ars Technica contributor Erica Sadun, for example, is asking for improved AVFoundation, CFNetwork frameworks, expanded UIKit objects and an improved Interface Builder (link), but we're at a loss to explain what all that means.

In any event, our questions should be answered soon enough. My colleague Jon Fortt will be live-blogging the show for Fortune.com, as will several other sites. (9to5 Mac says it will be displaying four live-blog feeds at once.)

We'll be monitoring the special event from our leafy backyard in Brooklyn and will post a summary of the key findings as soon as we know what they are.

See also: What's on your iPhone 3.0 wish list?

This comes from one Web metric among many, so take it with a grain of salt.

But according to AdMob, one of the largest mobile Web ad networks, Apple's (AAPL) handsets now dominate mobile Web traffic in almost every category.

According to AdMob's analysis of the billions of ad requests it saw in January:

• The iPhone OS now represents 51% of U.S. smartphone traffic, leaving RIM's (RIMM) BlackBerry (19%) and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile (14%) in the dust.
• In the global handset market, the iPhone and iPod touch now represent 18.3% of worldwide ad traffic — second only to Nokia (NOK) with 30.1%
• Worldwide requests from Apple devices grew 28% month over month to 1.2 billion in January.
• The iPod touch is rapidly catching up to the iPhone; it now represents 40% of Apple requests, up from 20% in September.

AdMob stores and analyzes every ad request, impression and click from more than 6,000 publishers' sites in over 160 countries every day, according to its website. Its January analysis of all that traffic, issued Thursday, is available here.

It's classic Microsoft.

On Thursday, two business days before Apple's (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference, Redmond sent a shot across Cupertino's bow with a letter to Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile partners — with copies to the press.

It's already been noted that the letter quietly moves Microsoft's goal post — from its 2008 target of "more than 20 million Windows Mobile licenses" in February to "nearly 20 million" today. (see here)

But what struck me was how relentlessly the document tries to slip the shiv between Steve Jobs' ribs. It contains only one direct reference to the iPhone, a 3G version of which is expected Monday and will likely set off a flood of headlines as new applications roll out and Apple's deals with international carriers kick in. Clearly Microsoft is trying to get its jabs in while it can — and, in the process, has set what may be a modern record for passive-aggressive disses per graph. I count 36 in all, but I may have missed a few.

Judge for yourself. I've pasted a copy of the letter, with numbers and bold emphasis added, below:

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Letter from Andy Lees

To Our Windows Mobile Partners:

Earlier this year, I joined an amazing group of people and partners like you who work every day towards a vision of putting a ‘smartphone in every pocket.’ To reach this vision, together we’ve created an (1) open platform that provides freedom — the (2) freedom for people across the globe to get the type of handset they want (3) on the network they want, the (4) flexibility for our hardware and mobile operator partners to build on the platform, and the (5) opportunity for developers to create applications on our platform for virtually any need.

It’s now my honor and privilege to announce a milestone that our partnership has accomplished. This fiscal year we will sell (6) nearly 20 million Windows Mobile smartphone licenses, making Windows Mobile one of the most widely used smartphone software platforms in the world. We also sold more in the previous four quarters than RIM, and (7) in the last quarter our year-over-year unit growth alone was greater than sales of Apple’s iPhone.

To our (8) 50 handset makers building phones with our software, thank you. With your help, we give Windows Mobile customers (9) nearly 150 different phone choices — from phones with (10) full keyboards to brilliant touch screens to (11) convenient flip phones — with (12) rich email, picture and music experiences. You've delivered Windows Mobile phones with features like (13) GPS, (14) 3+ megapixel cameras, and (15) voice activation — features that (16) other operating systems have been slow to deliver.

To our (17) 160 mobile operator partners around the world providing voice and data service for our mutual customers, thank you. Because of you, Windows Mobile customers can send (18) instant messages to their families or (19) update their calendars in countries from (20) Brazil to (21) Belgium, (22) India to (23) Italy. We're proud that we've been able to work with you to deliver more than (24) 40 different phones that run at 3G speeds, at (25) prices that meet a range of customer needs — something (26) not all smartphones can claim. We believe the power of smartphones should not be constrained by (27) price, (28) geography, or any (29) other boundary.

To all our developer partners who continue to innovate and bring new experiences to people and businesses every day, thank you. It is because of you that our Windows Mobile customers have the (30) richest application catalog to choose from — (31) over 18,000 applications to help pursue their hobbies, navigate life and work more efficiently. We're happy to offer some of these applications through the Windows Mobile Owners Circle and provide you the (32) flexibility to deliver them to your customers in whatever way makes sense.

Today, more and more (33) competitors are jumping into the smartphone market or announcing (34) upgrades, with (35) features we delivered to customers years ago. Overall, we all benefit from the increased attention on everything that a smartphone can do and the difference it can make in people’s lives. But ultimately, it is your commitment to Windows Mobile that’s helped shape our success. Our shared desire to help people do more with their phone (36) the way they choose, and our ongoing focus to deliver experiences that delight our mutual customers forms the foundation of our continued success together.

I look forward to continuing this adventure with you.

Andy Lees

Sr. Vice President

Mobile Communications Business

Microsoft Corporation

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As the Fake Steve Jobs puts it, quoting the Fake Katie Cotton, "this kind of stuff just makes the Borg look desperate."