Apple and RIM will continue to battle it out for smart phone market share throughout 2009, Carton predicted. "The smart phone industry is big enough to support two monster winners," he said.

RIM's strength relative to upstart Apple will, he said, depend to some extent on whether the former can address the complaints users have reported about the Storm. "Competitive pressures may have caused the Storm to be launched before it was quite ready for prime time," Carton said. "But if RIM can rapidly fix its initial glitches and bugs, the survey shows that this new offering, along with RIM's other recently released models, will provide accelerated momentum in 2009.

"Apple had glitches with the iPhone, too. If the iPhone couldn't get a dial-tone, it wouldn't be where it is now," Carton said, talking about complaints immediately after the July 2008 launch of the iPhone 3G, when about the phone's inability to acquire and hold a signal. Apple in September to solve the problem.

But as RIM and Apple make the smart phone market a two-company tussle, others, most notably , have been left behind, Carton noted. In the December survey, only 9% of consumers who said they planned to purchase a smart phone in the next 90 days said they would buy a device from Palm. As recently as a year ago, Palm's share of future purchases stood at 23%.

"With Apple and RIM now controlling two-thirds of the smart phone market, smaller and weaker players such as Palm have proven unable to compete," Carton observed.