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

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.

- – - -

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?

Think of the jagged light blue line in the fever chart at right as the bubble of hype that keeps Apple's (AAPL) iPhone floating above of its competitors.

What you're looking at is a snapshot of a Google Trends chart comparing the number of times the word  "iPhone" appears in a Google search request with the words "Palm" (PALM), Research in Motion's (RIMM) "BlackBerry," Microsoft's (MSFT) "Windows Mobile" and Google's (GOOG) "Android."

The full chart — going back to 2004 — and the color key are pasted below the fold. Or you can click here to recreate the chart on your Web browser.

Google Trends is a powerful tool. It has been used, most famously, to monitor influenza outbreaks by tracking flu-related Google searches — a epidemiological early warning sign that turns out to be more prescient, by two weeks, than the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's surveys of 1,500 hospitals. (Google explains its methodology here, with a link to an article in Nature.)

You can do a Google Trends search on anything. Blogging pioneer Dave Winer ran a series recently comparing "Twitter," "Web 2.0" and "RSS." Twitter won that clap-o-meter competition hands down. Twitter's micro-blogging tool been a hot media topic for more than a year, but Winer's Google Trend search shows that it's been on fire since January.

Let's take a closer look at the iPhone chart, below the fold.

More

For much of last year, AT&T (T) Mobility's websites seemed to be promoting every cell phone in their arsenal except for the iPhone — as if the company wasn't sure the revenue coming in from iPhone users was worth the steep bounty it was paying Apple (AAPL) for each sale.

No more.

Today when you visit its website, a promo for the iPhone 3G ("Now Available Online!") is often the first thing that pops up  — and based on the fourth quarter results the company released Wednesday, you can see why.

The iPhone is still an expensive proposition for AT&T. The kickback to Apple — between $288 and $432 per phone over the life of a 2-year contract, according to various estimates — and the $450 million the company says it spent last quarter on network upgrades to provide high-speed 3G coverage, contributed significantly to the 23% year-to-year decline in AT&T's quarterly net income (to $2.4 billion from $3.1 billion).

On the other hand, Q4 revenues were up 2.4% (to $31.1 billion) in a tough economic climate thanks to results in the wireless division that CEO Randall Stephenson attributed largely to the iPhone.

"The success of our iPhone 3G launch has driven wireless growth and helped redefine the wireless data space," he said in a press release.

How did the iPhone do that? Let us count the ways:

1. AT&T has activated 4.3 million iPhone 3Gs since its launch, 1.9 million in Q4 alone — more than double its iPhone activations one year earlier.
2. The average revenue from Phone users is 60% higher than the typical AT&T customer — thanks to that $30 per month data fee. Their heavy use of Web services helped drive AT&T wireless data use up 51.2% year to year, which as reader Jon in Brentwood, Calif., points out is not necessarily a good thing.
3. About 40% of the iPhone activations this quarter were new AT&T customers, either buying their first cellphone or switching from another carrier.
4. The churn rate — the percentage of customers who drop AT&T's service — among iPhone owners is significantly lower than the rest of the network, sharply reducing marketing costs.

Although iPhone 3G activations were down 21% quarter to quarter — to 1.9 million from 2.4 million after the device's July launch — they still outpaced Research in Motion's (RIMM) much hyped BlackBerry Storm. According to one estimate, Verizon (VZ) has activated some 1 million Storms in its first two month of sales.

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)

Despite the hundreds of customers who queued up outside Verizon (VZ) stores early Friday to buy the Storm –  Research in Motion's hot new smartphone — the company is likely to miss its subscriber targets for the quarter that ends Nov. 29, according to a report issued Monday by Citigroup (C) analyst Jim Suva.

The Storm, RIM's (RIMM) answer to Apple's (AAPL) iPhone, sold out almost immediately — and that's the problem, according to Suva.

Further investigation, he says, showed that the stores only received 40 to 100 units each, and that disappointed customers were told they could order online but wouldn't get their Storms until Dec. 15 — too late to count in RIM's third quarter sales.

The Storm's late release and its limited supply were among several factors that caused Suva to trim his estimate of new subscriptions this quarter from 2.9 million to 2.7 million. He also predicts Q3 earnings to come in at $0.85 per share on sales of $2.85 billion — well below the Street's consensus of $0.91 EPS on sales of $2.96 billion.

Among the other clouds on RIM's horizon, as Suva sees them:

• Lack of Wi-Fi on the Storm and reviews that were "generally positive, but by no means spectacular."
• The delayed launch of the Blackberry Bold at AT&T (T) and sales that, while "solid," seem to be primarily replacements rather than sales to new subscribers.
• The continued unavailability of the Bold in the United Kingdom, a key European market for RIM.
• The "tepid" response to the Kickstart clamshell phone at T-Mobile (DT), which seems to be more concerned with selling Google (GOOG) G1s than RIM BlackBerries.
• A shift in thinking within corporations, which in today's economic climate are starting to view the BlackBerry as a "nice to have" item rather than a "have to have."

See also BlackBerry Storm: The reviews are in and BlackBerry Storm vs. Apple iPhone.

A major update to the iPhone's firmware arrived at the stroke of midnight Thursday, surprising Apple (AAPL) watchers and taking just a little steam out of the Friday launch of Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry Storm.

iPhone 2.2 contains dozens of fixes and improvements — most of which had been telegraphed in advance through leaks from the developer community. Apple's handy checklist:

• Enhancements to Maps
  • Google Street View
  • public transit and walking directions
  • display address of dropped pins
  • share location via email
• Enhancements to Mail
  • resolved isolated issues with scheduled fetching of e-mail
  • improved formatting of wide HTML email
• improved stability and performance of Safari
• Podcasts are now available for download in iTunes application (over Wi-Fi and cellular network)
• Decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
• Improved sound quality of visual voicemail messages
• Pressing the Home button from any Home screen takes you to the first Home screen
• Preference to turn on/off auto-correction in Keyboard Settings

No. 1 on that list — Google Street View — is the first new feature we tried out. It also happens to be the most conspicuous trick that Google (GOOG) Android phones performed that iPhones couldn't.

Well, now they can. For example, here's the street where Steve Jobs works, as seen through an iPhone sitting 2,944 miles away:

One caveat: The iPhone lacks an internal compass, so it still can't deliver Google's vaunted Compass Mode, where the view changes as you swing your smartphone left and right (see here).

For more on what the update offers, see here. To download it, plug your iPhone into your computer and click on Check for Update. iPhone 2.2 weighs in at 246 MB and installs in less than 10 minutes.

The BlackBerry Storm, Verizon (VZ) and RIM's (RIMM) answer to Apple's (AAPL) iPhone, opens like a Broadway show on Friday. So naturally, Thursday's papers and blogs are full of reviews. A sampling of the big ones:

• Walt Mossberg. The Wall Street Journal. BlackBerry's Storm Presses Into the Touch-Phone Fray: Mixed positive. He likes the high-res camera (which does video), the replaceable battery, the push e-mail, the ability to cut-and-paste, the corporate security features and Verizon's 3G network — an improvement over AT&T's (T). He misses Wi-Fi, however, and he's not particularly fond of the so-called SurePress touchscreen. "The feature does provide a more reassuring confirmation that a key has been struck or an icon has been clicked than the mere visual feedback one receives from the iPhone. But neither I, nor any of the several BlackBerry addicts I asked to try it out, considered typing on the Storm's keyboard to be very similar to using the keyboard of a traditional full-sized BlackBerry." (link)

• Joshua Topolsky. Engadget. BlackBerry Storm review: "The selling points are easy: the phone is gorgeous to look at and hold, it's designed and backed by RIM (now almost a household name thanks to their prevalence in the business and entertainment markets), and it's packed with features that, at first glance, make it seem not only as good as the iPhone, but better. The only hitch in this plan is a major one: it's not as easy, enjoyable, or consistent to use as the iPhone, and the one place where everyone is sure they have an upper hand — that wow-inducing clickable screen — just isn't all that great." (link)

• Daniel Dumas. Wired.com. RIM's First Touchscreen Device Almost Eclipses the iPhone: "WIRED Click screen is a revelation for touch compatible devices. Converts iTunes to BlackBerry media without breaking a sweat. Included GSM card means the Storm is a true globetrotter – it can work in virtually any foreign port. Photos, video, and text pop like Ice Cube's AK (on a bad day). Posh fit and finish look rich enough to buy YOU dinner. — TIRED OS lag on a piece of hardware this gorgeous is unacceptable. Scrolling through menus is jagged, slow, and pokey. Accelerometer sometimes takes a good 5-10 seconds to orient itself. Lack of Wi-Fi is lame. Verizon's totalitarian control over the Storm's OS is even lamer." (link)

• Yardena Arar. PC World. BlackBerry's Storm: Awkward and Disappointing: "The decision by Research in Motion to differentiate the Storm by giving its capacitive touch screen a mechanical component (the entire screen functions as a button for confirming selections or initiating actions) turns out to be more confusing than helpful. Ultimately, the Storm's touch interface feels like a failed experiment. — It's too bad, because the Storm has some nice features and makes a great first impression." (link)

• The Boy Genius. The Boy Genius Report. Verizon BlackBerry Storm review: "The good thing is that this is, afterall, a BlackBerry, and once you get past accepting that there will be some hiccups, it’s really not all that bad. It’s a great phone, a very good device for email, a really good media player, and a decent web browsing machine. You’ll just have to decide what your priorities are in a mobile device and see if the Storms meets that." (link)

Have you weathered the Storm? Tell us what you liked — or didn't like — in the comments below.

Who says you can't have it both ways?

With RIM's (RIMM) touchscreen BlackBerry Storm set to be released in the United States next Friday, CIO.com has published eight reasons to choose the Storm over Apple's (AAPL) iPhone.

The same day, it published eight reasons to pick the iPhone over the Storm.

Both pieces are by Al Sacco, who probably doesn't pay for the phones he reviews.

Here's why he prefers the Storm:

1. Stereo Bluetooth capability
2. Removable battery
3. Expandable memory
4. Video recording
5. Works as a tethered modem
6. Tactile feedback
7. Copy and paste
8. Multitasking

Here's why he prefers the iPhone

1. It's now second-generation
2. Built-in memory
3. iTunes App Store
4. iTunes integration
5. Full QWERY (virtual) keyboard
6. Wi-Fi support
7. iPod media player
8. Safari browser

To learn more, click here for why you should pick the Storm and here for the iPhone.