As everyone with a pulse knows, Facebook shares took another dive Friday to reach the lowest level yet since its ignominious public offering in May.

Shares closed at $18.06, down 5.4 percent, which is half of its happier $38 IPO price. Actually, more than half, with a 52.3 percent decline overall since then.

Investors are not pleased. Facebook employees are not pleased. Even the New York Times Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin finally got unpleased, and unloaded on Facebook’s CFO David Ebersman (who has been under attack, by the way, for a while now).

“When Facebook’s I.P.O. first started to appear troubled back in May, I purposely avoided weighing in. Frankly, I thought it was too soon to judge,” wrote Sorkin. “But we have passed the pivotal three-month mark.”

Pivotal! Ruh-roh.

Actually, the Silicon Valley social networking giant will have to pivot for quite a while going forward, for a myriad of reasons.

Most of all, as John Paczkowski noted on Friday, and is also well known:

“The expiration of Facebook’s first lockup on 271 million shares earlier this month tanked the stock. And with four more yet to go, there is clearly further volatility ahead. On Oct. 15, 249 million shares will become eligible for sale. On Nov. 14, the lockup will expire on 1.32 billion shares. On Dec. 14, another 49 million shares. And on May 13, 2013, the final 47 million shares.”

In other words, that’s a lotta lockups to be unlocked.

And, as you can see from these two helpful lockup-expiration-focused charts for a range of other tech IPOs of late from SNL Kagan, that means a lot of downside for Facebook’s stock:

But, as I noted, this is already known by all, as Business Insider’s Henry Blodget — who has done some of the sharpest analysis on the troubled stock story at Facebook — correctly noted in a post titled, “It’s Becoming Clear That No One Actually Read Facebook’s IPO Prospectus Or Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter To Shareholders” on Friday.

“As Facebook’s stock continues to collapse, the volume of whining is increasing,” wrote Blodget. “As I listen to all this whining, I have a simple question: Didn’t anyone even read Facebook’s IPO prospectus? The answer, I can only assume, is ‘no.’”

No, they did not, or they might have read about everything from the company’s slowing growth rate to its mobile issues to, yes, all those billions of lockups to come.

Also, he noted, a bit of math would have yielded the high price-to-earnings ratio, which remains high at Facebook’s current low stock price, especially compared to Google and Apple.

That does not mean everyone is gnashing teeth. One of Facebook’s key Wall Street underwriters, J.P. Morgan, gave a stronger thumbs-up to the company in a note released yesterday for the future, even as it cut back on its target price by 33 percent.

The worst news: J.P. Morgan’s Doug Anmuth gave Facebook shares a $30 target, which is still far below his $45 target in late June.

Still, he also struck a sunnier note, saying he expects advertising revenue at Facebook to rise in the next year, even as payments revenue and overall profitability will be less.

Anmuth also said he expects Facebook to repurchase some of its now-cheaper shares to settle its tax bill related to restricted stock units via the credit or cash, rather than stock sales.

“This would essentially amount to a buyback of ~120M shares totaling $2.2B at current prices, and it would reduce the outstanding share count,” he wrote.

That’s probably cold comfort to shareholders, especially given most Wall Street analysts have urged buying, even as the stock has dropped.

Then again, since it’s not yet clear where the bottom truly is for Facebook shares, it is at least one less thing to worry about.

It was only a year ago that Bezos introduced a plethora of devices in New York, including Kindle Touch for $99, a 3G version for $149, a Kindle Fire for $199 and a bare bones e-reader for $79.

This year promises to be an equally significant event. But until we find out what it entails, let’s do a quick recap of what we know so far:

The 10-Inch Kindle Fire:

While this has been the biggest rumor that has been out there, a larger Kindle Fire 2 — which would be equal in size to Apple’s iPad — is most definitely not a done deal. According to several sources, even though a larger cousin of the seven-inch Kindle Fire is definitely in the works, it’s not clear if Amazon is ready to roll one out quite yet.

There might, though, be a slightly larger version, perhaps around eight inches or slightly more.

While not getting a 10-inch version might disappoint some, with Apple’s latest iPad expected to be a smaller version, sources said that competing head on with the old one is a possibility but might not come in this iteration.

The Seven-Inch Kindle Fire:

As reported by AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski, there will be an updated seven-inch device, which is expected to be thinner and lighter than the original.

It is also likely to have a built-in camera and a much-improved display. Developers are being told to expect a display with a 1280×800 pixel resolution, which is a bit different than the 1024×600 display of the current Kindle Fire.

Back-Lit E-Reader:

One of the biggest upgrades to expect in the black-and-white department is a device with back-lit technology to compete with the Nook Simple Touch with its GlowLight. The Seattle mega-retailer has kept this product under wraps, but a small acquisition made in late 2010 gives the effort away. 

That company, founded in 1991 in Helsinki, was named Oy Modilis. It has a number of patents relating to lighting technology that can be used in e-readers, according to TechCrunch, which spotted an early prototype a few months ago.

Price:

Since the Kindle Fire was introduced last year, the seven-inch Nexus 7 came out with many of the same specs and at the exact same price point. If the original Fire has a chance to continue on, it would have to fall below $199 with the new version at or near that price to remain competitive.

How low can it go? What if there were a bare-bones device subsidized by Prime subscriptions and advertising? Still, about 16 months ago, Kindle Director Jay Marine told AllThingsD ”the economics don’t work” for a free Kindle.

Connectivity:

Today, the Fire ships with Wi-Fi, but no cellular connectivity. Expect that to change, but how it will work is anyone’s guess. Today, Amazon packages 3G with some of its more expensive e-ink readers for free.

But that seems like an impossible model when it comes to devices designed to be media hogs. While not optimal to make consumers pay for 3G or 4G, having the option is a feature consumers might be looking for.

Five years ago, AllThingsD.com was launched with just a few staffers, a few stories and a whole lot of hope. Also, as it turned out, with a panoply of LOLcat photos.

The site had soft-launched a little earlier, but — officially — we opened our doors in the late evening of April 26, 2007. Walt Mossberg wrote about a Kodak printer; John Paczkowski wrote about, wait for it, Apple; and I opined on how then-Yahoo-CEO Terry Semel might save the troubled company.

The more things change …

Actually, despite the fact that we have grown hugely in both traffic and staff, and have logged almost 26,000 posts, little has changed in how ATD looks at its role in covering tech, using stringent standards of fairness, accuracy, ethics and reporting.

As I wrote back then: “That is what we will be trying to do most of the time here, attempting to figure out what is happening in the digital space and explaining it in a way that is clear and cogent.”

And, of course, have some fun doing it.

Thus, mission accomplished, and mission never accomplished, too.

Walt and I want to thank everyone, from our outstanding staff to our Dow Jones colleagues to the many companies we cover to — most of all — our readers.

There is a lot more to come going forward, and we hope to never disappoint and always delight.

And, as I also wrote back then at the dawn of AllThingsD:

“But enough looking back: On to the next thing.”

And to my amazing partner, Walt, you knew I could not resist:

My colleague John Paczkowski’s sources have already told him that Apple was planning to use the event to talk about a textbook initiative, and today’s brief invitation certainly doesn’t discourage that line of thinking. Per John’s Jan. 3 story:

Sources close to the company tell AllThingsD that the event will involve an initiative related to iBooks in education, presumably with some sort of tie-in to iTunes U.
Details beyond that are slim, though we’re told that this is an effort Jobs had been involved with in the months prior to his death. That could mean that it’s the textbooks-on-iPads plan that Jobs famously discussed with biographer Walter Isaacson. Fox’s Clayton Morris is hearing something similar.
The textbook market is certainly ripe for digital disruption, but the players that have emerged so far are pumping in a lot of cash with little to show for it.

If you want to start speculating — of course you do — it’s worth noting that none of the big textbook publishers are working with iBooks and Apple’s iOS ecosystem in any significant way, though Apple and the publishers have had on-and-off conversations for years. Perhaps some of that changes this month, or perhaps Apple pushes into education without working with the traditional players.

This will be Apple’s second visit to the iconic Guggenheim in a year. Last February, media boss Eddy Cue showed up there for the launch of the Daily, News Corp.’s tablet newspaper. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

Maybe because it is a Friday in August, it’s natural that the Apple iPhone 5 rumors would get jacked up again.

Today, it was an erroneous report that Apple would hold a media event on Sept. 7, which was soon countered by another post by Jim Dalrymple of The Loop that said the company would not.

The second is the right one, because — as John Paczkowski has previously written — October is when Apple plans to launch its next-gen iPhone.

Several sources we have rechecked with today underscored that the later time frame — some had thought Apple would launch its latest products sometime in September, as they had done in previous years — was accurate.

There are always a myriad of rumors around the exact dates of basic events for Apple, a company which attracts an unusual amount of attention from consumers and the media, unlike any other tech company.

As we noted in our report, which many have also written about, “the iPhone 5 will use the faster A5 processor on which the iPad 2 runs, a Qualcomm dual mode GSM/CDMA baseband, and a higher resolution eight-megapixel rear camera.”

Apple will also unveil its iCloud offering to consumers then too, which it has already released to developers in beta.

So for now, we’d like everyone to go back to their beach chairs and chillax to the haunting work of one of Apple’s favorite bands — U2 — called, of course, “October”:

No one at AllThingsD.com had any idea the mild-mannered head of Apple marketing Phil Schiller was so hip.

Well, at least in this cool video, in which he is Auto-Tuned from the Worldwide Developer Conference for Apple in June, using the naughty quote above from our own John Paczkowski.

March marked the 20th consecutive quarter that Mac shipment growth exceeded that of the PC market.

Mac shipments grew 27.7 percent in March, a period that saw a 1.2 percent decline in total PC shipments, according to IDC data reported by Needham analyst Charlie Wolf. And that growth occurred in every single major regional market.

In Europe, Mac sales were up 10 percent year over year, while the PC market was down 17.5 percent; in Asia they were up 69.4 percent, while the PC market was up just 8.8 percent. And in Japan, Macs were up 21.1 percent in a PC market that declined 16.1 percent.

The story was pretty much the same in the PC market’s various segments. Mac shipments to business grew at a “torrid” 66 percent pace in a market that posted just 4.5 percent year over year. Shipments to government spiked 155.6 percent versus the broader market’s 2.3 percent. And shipments to the home market grew 21.6 percent, while those of PCs slipped 6.5 percent.

That’s some extraordinary growth, particularly since it’s largely organic. “… Shipment growth has resulted solely from an outward shift in the demand curve rather than from a relative reduction in Mac prices,” Wolf observes. Interestingly, the average price of a Mac has fallen at just 1.6 percent annually since 2005.

So what’s the engine of all this growth–aside, of course, from the Mac itself?

Apple’s iOS devices and its carefully cultivated retail presence.

“The key drivers of the growth in Mac shipments over the past five years have been the halo effects emanating from the iPod and iPhone,” Wolf says. “The Apple Stores have played an important supporting role in providing convenient destinations and support resources for Windows users new to the Mac.”

And those three things will become even more powerful drivers of Mac sales as Apple extends the reach of the iPhone and iPad with an ever-expanding rollout of international Apple Stores. Says Wolf, “The iPhone is competing in the mobile phone market, one measured in billions of units rather than the portable music player market, one measured in millions of units. Of course, the iPad is waiting in the wings.”

Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie said that Thursday following the company’s steep first-quarter earnings warning. And while he may have convinced himself, he doesn’t have much company.

RIM shares slipped deep into a nasty downward spiral Friday, falling more than 13 percent and dragging the company’s share price below $50 for the first time in six months. And if the barrage of brokerage downgrades issued this morning is any indication, it may be there for a while. To a one, the analyst notes I’ve read this morning reveal a profound loss of faith in the company.

“BlackBerry is a broken brand on its historical high-end user base, RIM is under attack on the Corporate segment, and the company’s profitability premium to peers is at risk,” Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu wrote in a note to clients. “We see management expectations for a rebound driven by the launch of the PlayBook and QNX-based phones as unreasonable. We expect little upside from the PlayBook given the fundamentals of the tablet market and by no means consider QNX a game changer.”

Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette told his clients essentially the same thing. “While the company may be anticipating improving PlayBook sell-through in coming months, our latest sell-through checks indicate the opposite,” he wrote. “Additionally, we believe the slate of new products to be released in the second half of 2011 are unlikely to result in better share at the high end. We remain skeptical of the company’s ability to reaccelerate its earnings growth with its current roadmap.”

Even RBC analyst Mike Abramsky, a RIM bull if there ever was one, shook his head in disappointment. “Coming just a month after providing guidance, we believe this further damages already low credibility, making them the ‘poster boy’ for a show me story from here, with little or no credibility given for their $7.50 F12 EPS outlook,” he wrote in a bulletin to clients. “Given how pessimistic investors were already, this will more likely sustain pessimism than alter already polarized views–and may overshadow any pending announcements expected next week at RIM’s analyst day.”

Balsillie’s big refrains during yesterday’s guidance call were “stay tuned” and “just wait.” Looking at the company’s share price today, investors don’t seem willing to do either.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Why Is RIM So Optimistic About the Second Half of the Year?
• RIM Co-CEO Blames Lowered Outlook on Aging Product Line
• Research In Motion Warns Earnings to Fall Short Amid Weak BlackBerry Sales

“I will make more profits and certainly there is no technology company in the planet which is as profitable as we are.”

— Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, May 27, 2010

What was unimaginable just a decade ago has finally occured. Apple is now more profitable than Microsoft.

Posting earnings for its most recent quarter Thursday, Microsoft reported net income of $5.23 billion on revenues of $16.42 billion. Which turned out to be significantly less than the net profit of $5.99 billion on revenues of $24.67 billion Apple turned in last week.

Another remarkable–and remarkably ironic–milestone for Apple, which surpassed Microsoft in market cap last May. It was Microsoft, after all, that breathed new life into a struggling Apple back in 1997 with a $150 million investment in the company (see video below). What was it Bill Gates said at the time? “We think Apple makes a huge contribution in the computer industry. And we think it’s going to be a lot of fun helping out.”

Just what Apple plans to do with the domain is unclear. Presumably, it will have something to do with whatever cloud-based services the company is rumored to be ramping up in its 505,000-square-foot North Carolina data center.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple Poaches Microsoft’s Datacenter GM
• Apple’s Area 51: The Truth Is Out There
• Apple’s N.C. Data Center Intended for iTunes, MobileMe
• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

“The core thing here is that there’s been a transition that’s happened since our last guidance,” RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said during a conference call with analysts Thursday. “Our higher-end products are aging…and that’s affecting margins…and sell-through, particularly in the United States and Latin America.”

But fear not for RIM because RIM fears not.

“As we’ve said before, we feel great about the BlackBerry Platform and the PlayBook and how they’re doing….We just need to have some newer, higher-end products in the market….This is a transition….We’re cutting over to a whole new platform and whole new set of products and it’s very powerful and we’re very excited about their long-term strength and the long term strength of the company….We are straight in the middle of the whole tablet mobile computing space. And we absolutely have a whole next generation of smartphones, so strategically we feel fantastic, but operationally this stuff is pushed out so you have this transition. … We’ll have a very exciting BlackBerry World next week. You’ll see.”

To wit, J.P. Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz’s informal survey of Best Buy and Target outlets, which found that most hadn’t received any Transformer tablets yet. “All stores we spoke to had not even received the Transformer tablet,” Moskowitz says. “The general read was that supply would not reach most stores until mid-May. As a result, we ask how the Asus tablet can be sold-out when it did not arrive in the first place.”

Good question. “ASUS Transformer Sold Out” makes for a great headline, but a lousy story if there weren’t that many out there to sell.

While Sprint did lose contract subscribers–114,000 of them–that loss was significantly less than the 464,000 it lost in the first quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, churn fell to 1.81 percent from 2.15 percent (finally time to retire the “hemorrhaging subscribers like Dan Ackroyd’s exsanguinating Julia Child” analogy, I guess)

Sprint’s revenue for the quarter rose about 3 percent to $8.3 billion, surpassing analyst expectations of $8.19 billion. And its loss narrowed to $439 million, or 15 cents a share, from $865 million, or 29 cents, a year earlier. That beat expectations as well. The Street had been looking for Sprint to lose 22 cents.

Not bad, all things considered. As CEO Dan Hesse noted during this morning’s earnings call, being the No. 3 carrier in a market in which the No. 1 and No. 2 carriers both have the iPhone isn’t easy.

“We do typically see a significant impact upon the launch of a new device, or in this case, the iPhone 4 on a new carrier, Verizon,” Hesse said. “The iPhone continues to be a competitive threat to us, first in the hands of AT&T and now in the hands of Verizon….Quarter after quarter, the iPhone is a successful device and one that provides very strong competition to Sprint. Needless to say, Verizon’s introduction of their new iPhone this past quarter had a notable impact on our net add performance for the quarter.”

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop says the company is taking a measured approach to developing the device, which it wants to be “uniquely Nokia,” and if that means being late to market, then so be it.

“There are now over 200 different tablets on the market and only one of them is doing really well,” he told YLE TV. “My challenge to the team is I don’t want ours to be the 201st tablet on the market that you can’t tell from all of the others. We have to take a uniquely Nokia perpesctive. So our engineers are working very hard on something that will be different relative to everything else that’s going on in the market….We could take advantage of Microsoft technology and software, and build a Windows-oriented tablet, or we could do things with some of the other software assets that we have.”

In other words, Nokia doesn’t yet have a tablet strategy.

Which is disappointing, because it really should have one. That said, Elop’s tacit acknowledgement of tablet market realities and Nokia’s embarrassment of operating system “riches” situation is refreshing. The company’s going to be late to market no matter what it does, so why rush things? Better to work hard on differentiation and execution than to rush an unfinished product to market and have it branded unfinished and unusable and have it compared to “the homeless guy who plays air guitar in front of the mall.”

It’s nearly a year old, but its color alone has the cachet to catalyze demand, says Ticonderoga analyst Brian White. So much so it may give iPhone sales a nice little tailwind in the June quarter, adding an additional million units or so to Apple’s total for the period.

“…People buy Apple products for many different reasons, including status, aesthetics, functionality, quality and the ‘cool factor,’” says White. “In our view, this delay has created a certain mystique and scarcity value around the ‘white’ iPhone 4 that we believe could drive incremental iPhone 4 purchases in the range of 1 million to 1.5 million units per quarter until the iPhone 5 potentially comes to market in September. At the same time, the ‘white’ iPhone 4 will draw consumers into Apple stores and create a buzz around the company in the near term.”

Leaving aside for a moment the possible bias implied by White’s surname and a predisposition, perhaps, to overestimate the color’s popularity (kidding), he may well have a point.

Apple is promoting the hell out of the white iPhone with a massive “iPhone 4 in White” ad on Apple.com, and the device has certainly managed to command some significant media attention. Anecdotally, I know of a few folks planning to “upgrade to white,” despite the lack of any carrier upgrade eligibility policies for it.

Will that translate into an additional 1.5 million iPhones sold for the quarter? We’ll see.

It was great while it lasted, but Apple’s dominance in the mobile app market is coming to an end. Though it remains by far the leader in sheer app-store tonnage today, Android’s surging growth will soon change that.

According to a new report from analytics outfit Distimo, if Google’s Android Market maintains its current rate of growth it will surpass Apple’s App Store to become the largest app store in number of applications. In fact, it’s already tops in the number of free apps it offers.

“The Apple App Store for iPhone is the largest store in terms of all applications available; however it was among the slowest growing stores in terms of relative growth in March,” Distimo observes in its report. “Regardless of its low relative growth, the Apple App Store for iPhone was still second only to Google in terms of absolute growth figures.”

But falling behind Google’s Android Market growth rate will ultimately cost Apple its “biggest app store” title. Distimo expects the Android Market to have about 40,000 fewer applications than the Apple App Store for iPhone by the end of June 2011, and predicts it will close the remaining gap before the end of July 2011. “If all application stores maintain their current growth pace, approximately five months from now Google Android Market will be the largest store in terms of number of applications, followed by the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, BlackBerry App World and Nokia Ovi Store,” the company projected.

From Friday through Sunday, the carrier is calling on Seattle-area iPhone owners to bring their handsets in to one of 10 local stores, where the device will be matched against a Galaxy S 4G in a series of three download speed tests (conducted via an application specified by T-Mobile). If the iPhone (on Verizon or AT&T, which is in the process of acquiring T-Mobile) comes out on top in two out of three speed tests, it will pay them $1,000. If it doesn’t, iPhone owners dismayed by the loss can take advantage of a trade-in offer that will give them up to $300 toward one of T-Mobile’s smartphones.

A bold challenge, and I can’t imagine T-Mobile would have issued it if it wasn’t confident the Galaxy S 4G would out-perform the iPhone (T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network does have a theoretical peak download speed of 21 Mbps). That said, while the company’s 4G network is definitely fast in downtown Seattle, I’m told it can be fairly slow outside that area (it’s definitely not the fastest network in Seattle; see chart below). Which means T-Mobile could end up actually writing a $1,000 check or two.

[Image credit: Chart by Root Metrics]

“You didn’t think you would be reading this this morning, did you? Yup. It’s official. The team at Tungle will now be sporting new BlackBerrys,” Tungle founder and CEO Marc Gingras wrote on the company’s blog. “We’re really excited about this. We know there isn’t an industry more exciting than the smartphone and tablet markets. And RIM is a dominant player in this space.”

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed.

According to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the number of mobile phone users in the country reached 889 million at the end of March, up some 30 million in the first 3 months of 2011. And if that growth rate persists–and there’s no reason to think it won’t–that number should hit 900 million in May, June at the latest.

To put that into perspective, the U.S. currently has about 303 million mobile phone users.

China, then, presents a massive geographic growth opportunity for the smartphone industry, particularly with interest there in 3G devices on the upswing.

As I reported back in March, demand for smartphones in the country is taking off, and there’s lots of interest in the iPhone as well as handsets from Nokia and Android licensees like Samsung, Motorola and HTC. According to Morgan Stanley’s latest AlphaWise survey of China’s handset market, 87 percent of Chinese mobile phone users said the next phone they purchase will be a 3G device. Of those users, 30 percent said they expected that device to be an iPhone, 25 percent a Nokia device, 7 percent an HTC handset, 5 percent one from Samsung, 4 percent a Motorola device and 3 percent a Blackberry.

Apple and Nokia, then, appear to be the big winners overall, but the Android…collective also stands to do pretty well–especially when you’re talking about a potential market of 900 million.

[Image credit: Textually.org and Morgan Stanley]

Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

In a federal court filing late Monday, the retailer argued that the term “App Store” is generic and said it’s silly for Apple to claim otherwise when its own executives use it generically. Case in point: Steve Jobs’s comments during Apple’s Q4 earnings call last year.

In addition to Google’s own app marketplace, Amazon, Verizon and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android. So there will be at least four app stores on Android, which customers must search among to find the app they want and developers will need to work with to distribute their apps and get paid. This is going to be a mess for both users and developers. Contrast this with Apple’s integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone. Apple’s App Store has over three times as many apps as Google’s marketplace and offers developers’ one-stop shopping to get their apps to market easily and to get paid swiftly.

That Jobs used “App Store” is this way is a pretty compelling argument for it being generic and undercuts Apple’s claims that Amazon’s use of it will confuse and mislead customers. That said, Apple did popularize the term and was first to request a trademark on it. That its CEO sometimes dilutes that mark during earnings calls may be beside the point.

According to its latest 10-Q filing, Apple’s purchase commitments rose to $11 billion in the first quarter of 2011, up from $7.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010.

That’s a 39 percent increase and a record for the March quarter. Why the sudden uptick? Two reasons, most likely: the tight supply environment caused by recent calamities in Japan and the expected increases in iPad shipments.

Recall that during its last quarter, Apple sold every iPad 2 it could make and would have sold more had it been able to build them fast enough. The $11 billion in purchase commitments the company just made will likely make that possible. As COO Tim Cook said last week, “The iPad has the mother of all backlogs, but we’re working very hard to get [it] out to customers as quickly as we can.”

The mercurial U.S. smartphone market has a new favorite and it’s not the iPhone.

It’s Android, which is now the leading smartphone OS in the States in market share, according to a survey released this morning by Nielsen.

As of March 2011, 37 percent of smartphone users own an Android device, said Nielsen–significantly more than the 27 percent who own an iPhone and the 22 percent who own a BlackBerry.

That’s quite a shift from last October, when 27.9 percent owned an iPhone, 27.4 percent a BlackBerry and 22.7 percent an Android device. But evidently there’s a new trend in smartphone buying intent and it favors Android.

Nielsen’s latest figures show 31.1 percent of consumers planning to purchase a new smartphone leaning towards an Android device, up from 25.5 percent last fall. Meanwhile, 30 percent intend to buy an iPhone–down from 32.7 percent last fall–and 10.5 percent want a BlackBerry, down from 12.6 percent. As the research house notes, that shift in preference is already translating into sales. Half of those surveyed in March 2011 who purchased a smartphone in the previous six months said they bought an Android device.