iPhone, webOS to Hit BlackBerry Hard: Analyst

Nokia has seemingly been the device manufacturer feeling most of the global pain from the iPhone, but a note issued on Wednesday by Piper Jaffray’s T. Michael Walkley notes that in June both Palm's Pre and the iPhone grabbed market share from BlackBerry as well.

While this is a report from Piper Jaffray, it's interesting that in mid-June, CNNMoney, which published the info about the investor note, stated that RIM was still on solid footing with its BlackBerry devices.

In that report, Ryan Reith, senior research analyst at IDC said that:

"The buzz about other signature devices can make people overlook RIM's success."

Is that what's happening here? Perhaps not, as Walkley notes that carriers, eager as always to hop on the latest hot device, have been promoting the fresh and new, as opposed to the staid BlackBerry.

He added:

• BlackBerry Curve sales declined slightly at Sprint due to “solid sales” of the Palm Pre.
• Apple’s new iPhone 3GS and the $99 price point for the old iPhone 3G “impacted” BlackBerry sales at AT&T, with June’s numbers coming in below May’s.
• Verizon ended its buy-one-get-one-free offer for BlackBerries last weekend and Walkley’s checks indicate slightly slower BlackBerry sales and more action in the LG department, where Verizon started a similar promotion for their devices.

At the same time, yesterday Generator Research released a report with a prediction that Apple iPhone will it to catch and surpass Nokia for the top spot in the global smartphone market within three years. Generator Research is a small firm focused on digital media and the Internet.

While it's clear both Nokia and RIM will need to make some moves to keep ahead of webOS and iPhone, in particular it will be hard to take away market share from RIM, despite people wanting IT departments to support the latest cool devices.   After all, anyone who's played with ActiveSync on either of those platforms knows how short it falls when compared to the BlackBerry.