On Saturday, Palm released the Pre, the latest in a long line of potential iPhone killers. While the iPhone was not the first device to offer a touchscreen, its popularity has made the technology more common on major release Smartphones.

Many factors have an impact on consumer choice, particularly when buying something as complex as a mobile phone; price, network coverage, carrier, applications, and many others. But what about touchscreens? How interested are consumers in touchscreens versus a more traditional QWERTY keyboard? Touchscreens create a lot of interest, but are they top of mind for the average mobile phone shopper when they’re ready to buy?

This chart covers share of online interest in phones with a physical QWERTY keyboard or touchscreen on the “Big 4” carriers’ sites during the first quarter. Each bar represents one week.

Our data show that in the first quarter of 2009, touchscreens and QWERTY keyboards weighed in almost equally when it came to online interest. We’re also seeing that:

• Share of interest is trending upward for both features overall this quarter, although touchscreens have experienced a more consistent upward trend
• Share of interest in QWERTY phones averaged 37% and touchscreen phones 35% this quarter

But, according to our Q1 survey data, when it comes down to the purchase decision, touchscreens are not as important – at least not yet.

QWERTY keys were “important” or “very important” to 44% of those surveyed, while 37% said the same about touchscreens. We can see in the chart above, however, that 23% of respondents said that QWERTY keys were “very important”, compared to just 15% for touchscreens.

It’s not that touchscreens aren’t desirable for consumers – wireless shoppers on the web are clearly looking at phones with this feature, as we saw above. Still, they aren’t quite as influential as QWERTY keys when it comes to picking a specific phone to buy. Interest in these features and in Smartphones generally has been increasing.

It’s also important to note that while the data in the second chart shows us that QWERTY keys and touchscreens were important for 44% and 37% of shoppers, the corollary is that they weren’t important to 56% and 63%, respectively, when it came to their purchase decision.

So, even though a lot of the hype on advanced Smartphones is about touchscreens, QWERTY keyboards are actually a more important factor for most people when it comes to the purchase decision. Still, the majority of consumers don’t think either feature is important to their purchase decision.

In this tough economy where people are looking for value, the challenge for device manufacturers and carriers remains convincing consumers why these features are must haves for every wireless shopper, not just the early adopters.

Depending on your vantage point, a netbook might look like a small laptop or a large Smartphone.

The dual nature of the netbook may be marking a period of increasing convergence between computers and wireless phones. Companies that traditionally make computers are manufacturing netbooks and beginning to plan or consider moves into the Smartphone market. Wireless carriers are beginning to sell discounted netbooks tied to wireless broadband contracts. AT&T is now selling the devices in some of its stores and through RadioShack, while a Verizon Wireless rep recently confirmed rumors that they would offer a similar deal in the future.

Changes may be brewing in the consumer electronics and wireless industries, but when consumers searched for netbooks online in early 2009, where did they go? To find out, I looked at search data from compete.com.

This chart shows the top 10 sites that people were directed to after going to a major search engine and looking up a term that included the keyword ‘netbook.’ The sites are ranked by the percentage of all traffic generated by searches including the keyword ‘netbook’ that went to a particular site. What’s interesting here?

• Third party review and information sites have a strong presence in the top 10, including CNet, Wikipedia, Engadget, and the netbook-focused liliputing.com.
• Big brands’ sites are not as prevalent as they are for searches on ‘laptops’ where Dell and HP are the #1 and #3 destinations. Other netbook manufacturers like Asus and Acer don’t appear in the top 10 sites by keyword share for terms including ‘netbook.’
• Few retailers and no carriers appear in the top 10.

So these ‘netbook’ searchers are going to retail and manufacturer sites, but many are visiting third party review sites, blogs and information sites like Wikipedia to learn more about the devices, likely because heavy marketing and media reports on netbooks are a relatively recent phenomenon.

These data also suggest that there is opportunity here for big brands to have more of a presence when it comes to keyword share. Dell’s relative strength in this area compared to other big brands is likely due, at least in part, to strong marketing in early 2009 around its Inspiron Mini line, featuring it prominently in some promotions around their Presidents’ Day sales.

As new players enter the market, beef up their marketing campaigns, receive more press coverage, and step up their search marketing, we’re likely to see some changes in where these searchers land online. Will they gravitate to manufacturer sites? Carriers? Third party reviews? Stay tuned.

The Smartphone market is an increasingly crowded place. After Apple’s success with the iPhone from 2007 onward, more companies, from GPS manufacturer Garmin to PC manufacturers like Acer and Asustek, are throwing their hats in the ring.

In January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), wireless industry pioneer Palm announced that they were launching a new Smartphone, called the Pre (pronounced like “tree”). Since then, we’ve heard relatively little about the Pre, beyond the occasional launch rumor, and the sporadic report suggesting both Sprint and Palm have a lot riding on the success of this device.

Still, despite a weak economy, no solid release date, little advertising, and a crowded Smartphone marketplace, it doesn’t seem like the Pre has faded from consumers’ minds. Traffic on just the informational pages on Sprint.com and Palm.com since CES suggest that a lot of people are curious about the Pre.

• Unique visitors to Pre information pages on the manufacturer and/or carrier site(s) alone have been hovering around the 100,000 mark for the last seven weeks.
• Interest in the device around CES (week of January 4th) was high: nearly 400,000 people checked out one or both of these pages.
• A median of about 1.6x more visitors have visited Palm’s site over Sprint’s so far for information about the device. This may be in part because the Pre information pages on Palm’s site are more robust at the moment, including pictures of the Pre’s functions, as well as video.

This traffic is all despite the fact that neither Palm nor Sprint has consistently featured the Pre in a prominent way on their site since the announcement. For example, as of Tuesday afternoon, although there was a front page link on the Palm site, it was far below a feature for the Treo Pro, which launched this week, and the Pre was not mentioned on the Sprint.com homepage.

To gauge consumer interest in the Pre relative to other Smartphones, the original iPhone is perhaps the best example. Like the Pre, the iPhone was announced well before it was launched. When we look at interest in the original iPhone on Apple.com and AT&T’s website around the same time in 2007, we see different numbers, but a very similar pattern.

A few similarities between the two charts stand out.

First, in the case of the iPhone, the majority of the traffic throughout the period shown was also going to the manufacturer, Apple.com. In fact , AT&T didn’t have information about the iPhone on their site in the first week shown on the chart.

Second, although the numbers were higher for the iPhone than the Pre, the Pre’s numbers are fairly strong in comparison, especially when you factor in how much buzz surrounded Apple’s first foray into a Smartphone market that was much less crowded in early 2007. Online interest the week that the iPhone was announced resulted in 600,000 visitors to the information on Apple.com, about 50% more than the aggregate traffic we saw to the Pre on Sprint.com and Palm.com.

Although we don’t know yet how strong Pre sales will be, and eclipsing the phenomenal popularity of the iPhone would be a difficult task at best, it looks like the Pre may be positioned to have a fighting chance in a very challenging marketplace.

The application store rush is definitely on. Since the success of the iPhone’s App Store, Nokia, the Google Android Market, and the Microsoft Skymarket have all followed suit. Even PC manufacturer Acer has said they are looking into the viability of an application store for their new line of Smartphones.

News that Blackberry was planning an application store of some kind has been circulating for a while now, but few details were available. As an avid Blackberry user, I’ve been looking forward to App World for some time. Applications have been featured on blackberry.com for a while, but on nowhere near the scale of the iPhone App Store. There are other sites where you can find both paid and free applications, but no centralized place to go.

In the first week of March, I got an email from the manufacturer announcing that Blackberry App World was coming, inviting me to sign up to get updates. There are even some “App World” pages up on the site now, but no evidence when I visited the site of a big impending launch. Intrigued, I decided to investigate how popular the Blackberry site is today and if it is actually a destination for people looking for applications to add to their devices.

Blackberry.com has become an increasingly popular site in the last 12 months, with traffic growing more than 140% and visits per person increasing by 16% year over year.

People are heading to Blackberry.com in large numbers; most wireless device manufacturer sites have been getting fewer than a million each month. So, I took a look at the site to see what information about App World is actually available now. Of course, it hasn’t been officially launched yet, but there is actually some information about what it is and developing applications on the site. However, this is not easy to find: you have to click on “Software” and then on the “Blackberry App World” menu item, which isn’t highlighted and appears below a link to “Applications for Blackberry Smartphones”.

Even if you were one of those people who, like me, signed up for updates and got the email (pictured below), the call to action was clear, but you had to scroll to the bottom of the message to get to the registration link, in contrast to the large button used on the same graphic on their website.

The prospects for App World also look pretty good because the manufacturer’s site already seems to be the destination of choice for many people searching the web for apps. Looking at search data on where people who typed “Blackberry application” into one of the major search engines, it turns out that about a fifth of them are already heading to Blackberry.com.

Considering the number of people who are already going to Blackberry.com and their propensity to go to the site while in search of applications already, it’s likely that traffic to App World will increase in the coming months. In the meantime, I’ll still be searching far and wide on the web for new Blackberry applications.

Like many moviegoers, I’m eagerly awaiting the film version of the classic Alan Moore Watchmen comics, opening Friday. Although I’ve been getting most of my information about the movie through friends, and most recently an article in Wired, I wondered where people are going online to learn more about this highly-anticipated fill.

I analyzed where people who used terms including the keyword ‘watchmen’ on major search engines were directed over the last 10 weeks. The chart below shows the top 10 sites that these people were referred to by keyword share and the percentage of all traffic generated by searches including the keyword ‘watchmen’ that went to a particular site.

Even though the studio site was the #1 destination for these searchers, and official movie sites figured prominently into the top 10, much of the search traffic for this film was referred to social media sites.

• The official studio site was the #1 destination for searchers in this period: about 18.5% of people who searched for “watchmen” keyword were directed there. In fact, ‘watchmen’ was the 4th most popular keyword for warnerbros.com in general, generating almost 3% of the domain’s total search referrals over this same period.
• Wikipedia, at 18.4% of keyword referrals, was a close second in terms of most referrals, ranking above dedicated movie site IMDb.
• Social media sites took up three of the top 10 spots:
  • YouTube ranked fourth. Although the Watchmen-related videos were posted by individuals, one member did say the studio had given him permission to use official copies.
  • Blogspot was #9 by keyword referral, and MySpace rounded out the top 10.

In the next few weeks it’s likely that the flow of traffic to Watchmen-related destinations will change as people considering going to see the movie search for reviews. Visits to other review and social media sites – like Rotten Tomatoes (#11), Facebook (#12) and Twitter (#21) – will likely increase. Still, the fact that so much of this initial search traffic is going to social media sites before the release date suggests that the channel is an important information source for audiences even weeks before they buy a ticket.

So movie marketers take note: social media matters even before the movie is released. And, it’s making Watchmen look pretty cool.

See you at the movies.

Last week, I wrote about how the ownership of consumer electronics capable of shifting content is not limited to Americans in their late teens and 20s. While these products offer consumers more choice in terms of viewing media across time, place and device, they also introduce more complexity into the purchase process.

The question is, are the consumers shopping for these time shifting devices - like laptops, DVRs, portable media players, iPhones and other Smartphones - shopping for consumer electronics differently? To find out, I looked at results from a recent Compete survey.

As we can see in the chart:

• Those who are planning on buying a shifting device in the next 12 months (dark blue bars) were more likely to do their homework, spending more time on research and consulting more information sources.
• The people who weren’t planning to buy a content shifting device (light blue bars) were more likely to say that complexity wouldn’t change their behavior and that they’d let someone else do the shopping for them.

People in the market for shifting devices are probably more technically savvy, but they are also investing more time and effort into their research. In addition to shopping for devices that can be more complex to use, these consumers also need to understand emerging technologies and services that help them shift content across time and across device, whether it’s working out how to stream movies from Netflix to their TiVo, find the online videos they want to watch, or transfer video files to their Smartphone.

What does this mean for CE marketers and retailers? There is a lot of information online, but consumers need resources that help them sift through the clutter and choose the products and services that will enable them to shift content in the ways they want, without a lot of hassle and at a reasonable price. If retailers can come up with a way to present clear options alongside a place to purchase products and services, they would not only make consumer’s visions a reality, but also make strides at converting browsers into buyers.

For more on how consumers are researching and buying CE products that help them to shift content, and how other industries have dealt with complexity and the burden of choice, join us for “Shifting Content Across Time, Place and Device”, a free webinar tomorrow at 2pm EST. Click here to register.