These figures are disappointing for phone makers and services that rely on a strategy based on phone-first downloads. Nokia focuses mainly on mobile downloads for Ovi Music and Comes With Music, although it has a desktop client. Many carriers, like the North American AT&T, Verizon and Rogers, often try to guide their customers to download files from their own stores.

Apple has its own store available through the iPhone, but tries to steer customers to download from its iTunes desktop client first.

The study also concentrated on the preferences of European users in other areas of interest. A large majority of 82 percent was expected to regularly send text messages, but only 35 percent of them loaded applications on their phones and 25 percent browsed the web.

She also added that the iPad has a high potential for competing other categories too. Notebooks seem to be the most likely to be affected, as 44 percent mix of Windows notebooks and MacBooks are at risk. At the same time, 44 percent of iPod touch buyers are supposed to switch to the iPad. A significant part of up to 28 percent of the e-readers market is also vulnerable, while sales of desktops and game consoles are the least affected and are not supposed to lose an important number of customers.

Part of the drop in netbook sales growth in the first month of the year can still be attributed to the post-holiday usual drop-off in sales and to a maturing market, as many of the people already having a netbook did not see a reason to upgrade. The decline in March and April, however, was obviously influenced by the iPad launch, since many customers have reconsidered their plans of buying netbooks after this event and made the decision of buying an iPad instead.

The initial iPad offering is situated outside of the majority of the netbooks range. Its least expensive models occupy the high end of a field where $300 and $400 systems are very common. Additional features as an e-reader and game system definitely work to its advantage. The iPad can be less expensive for customers who want to have simultaneously a handheld device and a netbook-class device.

What triggered this growth is not known, but it came about five months after the Droid launch and two months after the Nexus One. These two were the earliest phones based on Android 2.0 or later and brought an important improvement of the performance and features of the Android platform. The Droid’s success in the United States created a significantly larger market for Android applications compared to the previous situation.

The mobile store of Google is significantly behind that of Apple. The latter has more than 150,000 applications and has reached Android’s current figures months ago. However, the gap seems to get narrower due to the fact that many iPhone developers are now writing for Android, in order to cover the widest audience possible.

The decisions of those who do not already own such a device may be favourable to buying an iPad. Of the group of potential buyers who plan to acquire an e-book reader within the next three months, more than 40 percent would want to have an iPad available for buying. Amazon’s Kindle is significantly behind at 28 percent while other e-book makers have only a small fraction of the demand. For example, the Nook form Barnes & Noble has only 6 percent of the demand, while the Reader line of Sony, a true veteran, has only 1 percent.

Of the total pool of surveyed persons, only 13 percent would buy an iPad, which is considered very favourable compared to the iPhone launch in 2007. Only 9 percent of the surveyed group were likely to buy an iPhone two months before the launch of the smartphone. This demonstrates that Apple will be more “on the wave” at the April 3rd release of the iPad than it was almost three years ago when the iPhone was released, according to the industry analysts.

About 68 percent of those expected to buy the Apple tablet plan to be able to browse the Internet with the device. Another priority is e-mail for a group of 44 percent potential customers. 37 percent of the persons taking the survey plan to read e-books while 28 percent would look at magazines. Other 24 percent would use the device for video playback.

Although apparently facing a high demand, Apple may not find itself in a very short term rush, as only 16 percent of the potential iPad buyers plan to acquire such a device within the first month, while most of 62 percent plan to wait between 2 and 12 months before buying. Another 8 percent would even wait more than a whole year.

Buying an iPad not only means profit for Apple but is also expected to affect the other products of the company. For instance, 10 percent of iPhone owners and 9 percent of iPod touch users would want the more expensive iPad, but another 13 percent said they would give up buying a Mac desktop or notebook to get the tablet that is a cheaper device. The high need of e-book readers is however expected to increase the overall demand for Apple devices and attract even those buyers who never thought to buy from the company.

Application development has been growing extremely fast over the past two years, especially among the iPhone and Android platforms. iPhone seems to have over 150,000 applications, even if in July 2008, the company started with only 500. Even if Android has started later, with only 30 applications, it has grown since then to over 20,000 applications (in only a year and a half).

BlackBerry App World, the Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace have only had success for a short period of time. Despite this, Windows Marketplace may be “reborn”, thanks to Windows Phone 7’s incompatibility; this will most probably force the rewriting of the applications in order to support the new operating system.

Google’s platform has seen a development jump of about 33 percent to 300 new applications, many of them thanks to launches of phones like the Nexus One. The important growth of Apple’s applications stimulated by the iPad has almost removed any hope for Android to beat Apple’s platform. This is also a positive indicator for iPad sales because customers are attracted by the applications on offer.

The recent success of the Apple iPad has clearly shown Apple is on the wave and at a level not seen in the last six months. Analyzing usage habits one can see they are fairly similar. While Android phone owners use to start up applications a slightly number of times monthly and ply games for a longer time, iPhone owners use applications slightly longer on average.

Those who manufacture digital quantum batteries can use current lithographic technology, according to Hubler, and this helps to make them cheaply. If the funding is approved by the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a battery could be manufactured this year. The nature of the batteries makes them easy to adapt for data storage too.

Joel Schindall, professor of electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the promising idea of making digital quantum batteries could present an issue regarding the strength of the nanofabricated materials that are forced to store energy.

Apple’s success was mainly based on the progressive rollout of the new iPhone 3GS, while Research in Motion owed its rise to the BlackBerry Curve 8900 in Europe and the BlackBerry Tour in North American countries. RIM has a relatively extended international scope for its smartphones, while Apple is expected to have a significant growth in China, Canada and Europe as well.

Platforms dedicated to smartphones also moved, depending on the supporting companies’ growth or decline. Symbian, for example, had a smaller influence due to Nokia’s own difficulties. Android, still having a small scope was left at 3.5 percent and mostly through HTC devices. Windows Mobile continued the negative growth, preceding the Windows Mobile 6.5’s release.

Nokia has lost share for the total phone market, dropping from 38.2 percent to 36.7 percent. LG and Samsung added share but they remain on the third and second place, respectively. Motorola and Sony Ericsson have lost about half of the market share they had and are at 4.5 and 4.3 percent respectively. The top five is threatened by Apple, which is continuously growing and is now just two percent outside this group.

What does this tell about Mac users? They usually have above-average income levels, which also means they have other electronics. Mac users are appropriately much more likely to own Apple handhelds: 28 percent own an iPod touch versus 9 percent of Windows homes, while 63 percent own some other iPod variant compared to 36 percent of the rest. However, these also tend to own two times as many devices as a whole and own more flash-based camcorders (20 percent versus 5), digital SLRs (32 percent versus 12), 50-inch or larger HDTVs (18 percent versus and GPS units (49 percent versus 30).

The conclusion of the study was that companies should look to Mac users as early adopters and thus likely indicators of what devices and technologies are about to become popular.