Apple: Inside the cult

Apple crushing BlackBerry! No, wait, BlackBerry beating Apple!

A couple of wildly differing numbers on smartphone usage came out today, with Apple and RIM ending up with one thing to crow about apiece. Let's start with the bad news for Apple: the number one selling smartphone in the first quarter of 2009 was the BlackBerry Curve, followed by the iPhone (which had been in first in previous quarters), the BlackBerry Storm, the BlackBerry Pearl (not including the Pearl Flip), and the T-Mobile G1. There are mitigating factors here -- the first burst of sales from the iPhone's introduction has passed, and Verizon is literally having a two-for-one sale on Storms. Still, the full list demonstrates why the iPhone's sales numbers can be somewhat illusory, even in those situations where it is in the top spot: there are multiple BlackBerry models, which are broken out separately in these lists, all going up against Apple's single iPhone. If this were an Apple vs. BlackBerry contest, RIM would probably be coming out on top fairly consistently.

And yet there's another story that comes from the latest survey of Web usage from Net Applications. This survey doesn't measure sales, or even installed base; it measures what operating systems and browsers are being used to visit a select list of Websites. Still, it offers a window into who's using the Web right now, and the mobile OS numbers are actually kind of shocking: iPhone/iPod touch 65 percent, Android 9 percent, Java ME 8 percent, Symbian 7 percent, Windows Mobile 6 percent, BlackBerry 3 percent. Keep in mind here that BlackBerry's OS actually had a head start on the iPhone OS (and Android, for that matter), and yet trails at the back of the pack.

What could the reasons be? My guess: BlackBerrys, until fairly recently, were considered a business communication tool. The Internet features it touted the most were about connectivity -- email and messaging. The iPhone has been a consumer-oriented Internet device from the get-go, which means that more of its users got it for the express purpose of browsing the Web. Everyone seems to agree that that's pretty much the future, and so BlackBerry is catching up with its new models -- the question now is whether people who were brand-loyal to RIM from their business experiences will make the jump to using BlackBerry as their everyday personal phone.

(In unrelated news: remember last week, when I talked about how much Apple likes Google? Well, it appears that the FTC may have something to say about that.)

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