That's hardly big news, but there are several other significant implications to the study, according to its author, Allyn Hall, director of In-Stat's consumer practice. Among those implications is that the switch to smartphones means that the popular BlackBerry faces potentially withering competition. The study included a survey of more than 1,000 mobile enterprise users.

While BlackBerries now typically have voice capabilities, Hall noted that smartphones from most large vendors have e-mail capabilities similar to those made popular by BlackBerry. And the power of these relatively new competitors will be hard for Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM), which develops the BlackBerry, to match.

"All of a sudden, RIM has Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson providing strong competition," Hall said. "That makes it hard for a relatively little company like RIM."

A second analyst, Derek Kerton, principal of telecom research firm The Kerton Group, agrees with Hall but said that he expects RIM to weather the storm.

"The competition is definitely coming at RIM, but the market for smartphones will grow a lot faster than the competition," Kerton said. "So there's still room for RIM to grow."