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.)

More

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.

More

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.

More

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

Palm Pixi

The clearest indication at whom Palm is aiming its newest smartphone, dubbed Pixi, is the new Facebook application that debuts in the younger, smaller sibling to the Palm Pre. If that is your thing, then perhaps your gadget has arrived.

At a meeting in San Francisco Tuesday afternoon, Palm chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein kept the Pixi half hidden in the black and orange slipcover that comes with the Pre. The top half of Pixi looks a lot like its older sibling, but when Rubinstein performed the full monty as it were, the device revealed itself as a candy bar-type phone that echoes the Pre’s styling without the slide-out keyboard.

Matte black, with the same sticky keys as the Pre, the Pixi is noticeably thinner and a tad smaller than Pre. Slick was my first impression, and still is. When I put my Blackberry Bold down on the table, it looked chunky by comparison. Rubinstein didn’t noticeably gloat, but pointed out that Pixi is more than 10% thinner than Apple’s iPhone 3GS, and 20% more svelte than any Blackberry device (there is a reason that Pixi is launching at New York’s Fashion Week after all). More

The way consumers use Apple's mobile phone (i.e., constantly) means big headaches for carrier AT&T. And more smartphones are on the way.

Randall Stephenson, chairman, CEO, and president of AT&T, holds up his Apple iPhone

At the South by Southwest music, film, and interactive fest in Texas earlier this year, the iPhone was all the rage — and not in a good way.

The device proved so popular with Internet-addicted attendees that AT&T's wireless network in the city of Austin buckled under the strain, all but shutting down both voice and data service for many customers.

iPhone users bashed the phone company on Twitter and in blogs, and AT&T (T) had to haul in extra network equipment just to ease the gridlock. More

Jon Rubinstein. Photo: Palm, Inc.

"We must do whatever we can to stop this."

That's how Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs is reported to have asked then Palm (PALM) CEO Ed Colligan to enter into a possibly illegal agreement to stop trying to hire away each others' top engineering talent.

If accurate, it may be one of the most stilted attempts to collude ever recorded.

Colligan's answer, according to Bloomberg's Connie Guglielmo, who says she has reviewed the two-year-old communications:

"Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal."

Is this really how conspirators talk?

Apparently so in Silicon Valley, where hiring practices long overlooked have come under increased scrutiny by the Obama administration.

More

iPhone and Pre. Photos: Apple, Palm

How often does the Palm (PALM) Pre break down and have to be returned and exchanged for a new one?

That question came up a few weeks after the Pre's June 6 launch when Jesup and Lamont analyst Kevin Dede, citing a decidedly unscientific online survey, reported that the Pre's return rate was a shocking 40%.

Pre Central, the site that conducted the poll, promptly disputed its own results. It ran a second, larger survey and got a slightly more comforting return rate: 18%.

A few days later, RBC Capital's Mike Abramsky weighed in, estimating the actual return rate to be 2% – 3%, a figure he arrived at by throwing out from his estimate of the total return rate  (8% to 15%) any units that were exchanged for new ones.

Now ChangeWave Research has released its own estimate, and while hardly definitive given the sample size, it at least provides some context.

Based on a survey of 198 Apple (AAPL) iPhone 3GS owners and 38 Pre owners, it found that the exchange rate of the Pre (11%) does indeed appear to be higher than the iPhone (7%), but not by much.

Images: Apple Inc., RIM

In a report to clients Tuesday, RBC Capital's Mike Abramsky takes a long (92 page) look at the "huge, nascent and underpenetrated" smartphone market and concludes that the emergence of devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone represents the next wave of computing — "as profound as the historic technology shift from mainframes to PCs."

Among his predictions:

• Smartphone penetration is likely to grow three fold over the next three years, to 504 million users in 2012 from an estimated 165 million in 2009. That's a 35% increase from his previous estimate of 395 million smartphones by 2012.
• Unlike the PC revolution, which was dominated by horizontally integrated platforms like Microsoft's (MSFT) DOS and Windows, the spoils of this one are likely to go to vertically integrated smartphone makers through the “special sauce” they employ to create unique, iconic user experiences.
• The most successful challengers — he singles out Research in Motion (RIMM), Apple (AAPL) and with less certainty, Palm (PALM) — could double or triple their revenues by 2012.

Almost as an afterthought, Abramsky raises his price targets: RIM to $150 from $100; Apple to $250 from $190; Palm to $25 from $18.

But the real value of the report may be in the rich collection of charts showing the scale of the potential market, the rate at which Abramsky expects it to grow and who he expects the winners and losers to be.

A sampling below the fold:

More

Map: TomTom

TomTom, one of the leading manufacturers of stand-alone GPS systems, rolled out its industrial strength iPhone car navigation software across the time zones Sunday, starting in New Zealand and ending with an app for the U.S. and Canadian markets early Monday.

The price, $99.99 for the app and its maps (a car mount adaptor kit is sold separately), is high for an iPhone application and puts it well above competing software-only products such as Sygic Mobile Maps ($39.99), CoPilot Live ($34.99) or the free built-in Google Map app.

But for travelers who depend on such things, it's a better deal than AT&T's (T) Navigator, a subscription service in which the app is free but the service adds $10 to your monthly cell phone bill for as long as you use it. (See The App Store takes a bad turn.)

TomTom's app stirred some interest in the tech press after Apple (AAPL) selected it to be one of the featured demos at its World Wide Developers Conference in June. In addition to TomTom's proprietary maps and the TeleAtlas, which it acquired in 2008 for $4.8 billion in a bidding war with rival Garmin (GRMN), it offers several features custom made for the iPhone OS. These include, according to its promo material:

More