Perhaps It's Time for Another One of Those "Your iPhone Contract Is Up" Ads?

Palm’s (PALM) Pre may compete Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone on a feature-to-feature basis, but judging from the latest search stats from comScore, the Pre has some way to go before it matches the iPhone in mindshare.

According to the research house, Palm Pre search activity, which more than doubled in late May thanks to Sprint’s “Now Network” advertising campaign, suffered a significant decline in mid-June, right around the debut of the new iPhone (click on chart below).

“The final two weeks in June saw the [number of weekly searchers on terms relating to the Palm Pre] fall to approximately half the number of the peak week of activity,” comScore noted in a release today. “Interestingly, this decline in Palm Pre search activity coincided with the launch of the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 on June 17 and launch of the iPhone 3GS two days later. Throughout May and the first week of June, the number of unique iPhone searchers remained fairly consistent at approximately one million people per week. In the week prior to the launch of the 3GS, however, the number of iPhone searchers more than doubled to 2.3 million people during the week of the launch.”

ComScore offers no correlating evidence beyond this, and the end of the Sprint campaign obviously played a role in the decline, but this is clearly not a simple coincidence. (Google Trends shows virtually the same thing. Click on chart below.) These are rival devices in a unique market we’re talking about. That said, comScore suggests that the Pre does resonate with an audience different from the one interested in the iPhone.

“Of the people who searched for Palm Pre-related terms during the eight weeks of the study,” comScore notes, “just 11 percent also searched on iPhone-related terms, suggesting that the majority of the people interested in the Pre have little interest in the iPhone.”