“The improvement of iPad 2′s display focuses on thickness and anti-reflection, not resolution,” Ming-Chi claims, adding that the device’s display module is 30 to 35 percent thinner than that of the iPad 1 and will eliminate some of the glare that some critics claim makes it difficult to read in bright sunlight.

That’s according to Susquehanna analyst Jeffrey Fidacaro (and AT&T, which confirmed that percentage to me), who doesn’t see the launch of the iPhone on Verizon as a catastrophic event for AT&T at all. He thinks the carrier stands to lose two million iPhone users at most to Verizon–hardly a mass exodus.

AT&T’s decision last year to accelerate upgrade eligibility for iPhone customers, making it easier for them to get the iPhone 4 when Apple released it, is proving a wise move indeed. What better deterrent to switching networks than the carrier’s $325 early termination fee?

In all likelihood, iPhone subscriber churn will be no worse at AT&T than it has been at other carriers that have lost iPhone exclusivity. As Matthew Key, CEO of Telefónica Europe, said during a February 2010 earnings call, “Ever since Vodafone has started selling the iPhone in January, we see absolutely no evidence of people leaving us, churning on the iPhone going back to Orange or Vodafone, so [we are] very comfortable with our iPhone volumes. We continue to out-trade the market and no sign of churn whatsoever.”

It’s indisputable that Verizon is going to sell a lot of iPhones when the device finally arrives on its network. The question is how many? And the answer is as varied as the research houses trying to pinpoint the number. On the low end, analysts have been calling for nine million, and at the highest end, 12 million.

Until today, when R.W. Baird & Co. analyst William Power reset those parameters with a bullish new potentiality: 23.8 million iPhones sold to Verizon subscribers in the first year.

That’s about double the top end of the range I mentioned (it’s also more than a quarter of Verizon’s current subscriber base). But according to Power–who cautions that this is a “directional number” and not a forecast (there are constraints around how many devices Apple can actually ship)–a recent Baird survey of 1,000 smartphone users supports it. From the survey:

• 29 percent of current Verizon feature phone owners said they will “probably” or “definitely” upgrade to the Verizon iPhone in the next three months. The carrier has roughly 64 million postpaid feature phone users, so that’s 19 million potential iPhone upgrades, assuming eligibility.
• 25 percent of Verizon’s current smartphone users said they will “probably” or “definitely” switch to the iPhone. That’s 4.8 million additional potential iPhone sales, again assuming eligibility.

Grand total: 23.8 million potential Verizon iPhone sales–from the carrier’s installed base alone. Add to that the 5.6 percent of current AT&T iPhone users who told Baird they planned to switch to Verizon and that number rises to nearly 25 million.

Which sounds fantastical, seemingly even to Power, who is standing by his current forecast of 10 million iPhone activations at Verizon. But it does suggest, strongly, that demand could be far greater than anyone has anticipated.

That’s great for Verizon (though perhaps less so for its network) and even better for Apple. Not too bad for AT&T, either. Doesn’t bode well for Android handset makers like Motorola Mobility, though. As CEO Sanjay Jha said during an earnings call yesterday, the company has already seen a slowing of device shipments around news of the Verizon iPhone. “Since the announcement of the iPhone, we have seen some slowdown in our sell through of devices at Verizon,” Jha said. “There was anticipation of devices coming to Verizon even prior the announcement of the iPhone.”

Below, a carrier-by-carrier breakdown of interest in the Verizon iPhone. Each pie chart represents the base of subscribers at each carrier who plan to purchase a smartphone in the next three months. Note: the 25 percent / 29percent numbers above refer to the percentage of the total base of Verizon respondents (i.e. Verizon respondents who plan to purchase a smartphone in the next three months plus those who don’t).

The 3DS will be available in the U.S. on March 27 for a competitively priced $249.99. The handheld game player’s big selling point is that it offers 3-D without the need for special glasses. The device will come in Cosmo Black or Aqua Blue. Prices will vary outside the U.S.

At an event today in New York, Nintendo revealed more of the device’s capabilities, and many of them sound like features found on the iPhone and many other smartphones.

Apple’s ability to turn its MP3 players and phones into portable gaming devices has been a competitive threat to Nintendo, which with the 3DS release looks like it is willing to recognize.

For example, the new 3DS has an online store, called the eShop, where users will be able to download games. It also has three cameras and a built-in gyro, so the device can be tilted and turned to affect game play. It will also have location-based features, where users can elect to receive new content from Nintendo or other 3DS users as they travel around. The feature can connect to Wi-Fi hotspots when in sleep mode to collect this content or to function as a pedometer, which counts a user’s steps.

Additionally, users can take pictures with the camera, or listen to music and surf the Web on an Internet browser, which will come soon in a system upgrade. Users will also be able to play with one another by exchanging a simple code. About 30 games are expected to be available by June for the device.

It’s some of these more nuanced features that could make the device more competitive, but it’s the 3-D interactivity that Nintendo is really pushing, and so far consumers have not gravitated to 3-D as a reason to upgrade a TV, so it’s unclear whether it will be a draw for the 3DS.

Nintendo’s enthusiasm for 3-D also suffered a blow when it issued a warning that it is not healthy for kids under the age of 6 to view 3-D images. Nintendo says the impact from that should be minimal because the 3-D effect can be ratcheted up or down, and even turned off completely.

Sprint said the charge will help it keep its network running smoothly for all the data-hungry customers, and tried to put some happy talk around what is, essentially, a rate hike.

“Sprint wants its customers to experience the range of entertainment and productivity possibilities available with today’s wireless technology,” Sprint consumer business President Bob H. Johnson said in a statement. “While some of our competitors impose overage charges and complex plans, Sprint continues to provide a worry-free, unlimited data experience while on the Sprint network. This is responsible, sustainable and reflects our commitment to simplicity and value.”

Existing Sprint smartphone customers are not affected unless they upgrade to or activate another smartphone, the company said.

The promise comes in a blog entry posted by Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise. “Unlike most providers, we don’t plan for our users to be down, even when we’re upgrading our services or maintaining our systems,” writes Glotzbach. From now on, all downtime that does occur will be counted and applied toward the customer’s service level agreement. In fact, the entire section of its SLA that covers scheduled downtime is being removed. This includes periods of 10 minutes or less, which under the terms of its old agreement didn’t count as downtime.

Google also released some data about the availability of Gmail, both the consumer and enterprise versions. It says that in 2010 it managed to maintain uptime 99.984 percent of the time. This, Glotzbach says, works out to about seven minutes of downtime per month. Citing data from the Radicati Group, he says that makes Gmail 32 times more reliable than the average on-premise email system and 46 times more reliable than Microsoft Exchange.

Over the years, Google Apps has taken some criticism for downtime issues and for not meeting the level of availability spelled out in its agreement. Shortly after it introduced its premier version in 2007, there were reports of availability problems. And there have been occasional Gmail outages like this one in 2009. As services we use daily migrate to the cloud, downtime seems an unavoidable by-product, as this list of incidents in 2010 from Data Center Knowledge suggests. It may seem like a small thing, but Google is making a strong statement here. It will be interesting to see if any of the other cloud providers respond in kind.

The Motorola Xoom packs a 16-by-10 aspect ratio, a dual-core processor, 1080p playback and Flash support, and will run on Verizon’s network. Initially, the tablet will run on Verizon’s 3G network, but Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha said the Xoom that goes on sale in the first quarter of this year will be upgradeable to 4G by the end of the second quarter.

“The software is not completely done,” Jha said, adding that the hardware isn’t either.

Google Android boss Andy Rubin had briefly showed a prototype Motorola tablet at last month’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference and said that Honeycomb was being designed expressly with tablets in mind.

The Xoom, Wi-Fi Samsung Tab and G-Slate are in addition to the Toshiba, Asus and Vizio tablets announced earlier in the week.

Nearly all of these tablets are running some flavor of Android, though a handful of Windows 7 tablets are also being shown in Las Vegas.

However, the scene in Vegas offers a somewhat skewed view of the tablet market. Outside Sin City, the iPad is still the dominant player, while a number of tablet competitors expected soon have opted not to launch here. HP is having an event next month to focus on future webOS devices, while Research In Motion has said it will launch its PlayBook before the end of March.

Motorola also used some of its afternoon event to show off the Motorola Atrix 4G, a smartphone introduced at an AT&T event earlier in the day. It packs a fingerprint reader, a dual-core 1GHz processor, and the ability to dock to an 11-inch screen and keyboard to act as a mini-laptop, with eight hours of battery life.

When docked, the phone can power a full desktop version of Mozilla, including full Flash support, allowing for a PC-like experience all powered by the smartphone. AT&T Senior Vice President Jeff Bradley said it is too soon to say how much the device will cost, but promised the price will be competitive. Although AT&T has the U.S. exclusive on the Atrix, Motorola said it will be offered through Bell Canada and Orange UK.

In addition to the Atrix and Tablet, Motorola announced its first phone to run on faster LTE networks–the dual-core Droid Bionic, which is slated to arrive early in the second quarter on Verizon Wireless. Motorola also introduced the Cliq 2, an update to Motorola’s first Motoblur phone for T-Mobile.

Update 5:45 pm PT: As for timing, I confirmed that the Motorola Xoom is indeed the “lead device” for Honeycomb and will be the first on the market when it ships later this quarter. The LG model is slated to ship “in the coming months,” and other Honeycomb tablets will follow.

Google isn’t sharing a lot of new details on Honeycomb, but Rubin did make a short blog post and upload this YouTube video, which touts Google Talk video chatting, a specially designed YouTube App and access to Google Books.

“Many of Android’s existing features will really shine on Honeycomb: refined multi-tasking, elegant notifications, access to over 100,000 apps on Android Market, home screen customization with a new 3D experience and redesigned widgets that are richer and more interactive,” Rubin said in the blog post. “We’ve also made some powerful upgrades to the web browser, including tabbed browsing, form auto-fill, syncing with your Google Chrome bookmarks, and incognito mode for private browsing.”

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Last year the aquarium’s Seafood Watch program launched an iPhone app that does the same thing on a searchable and localized scale.

And it’s been downloaded 325,000 times. So, this week, the Seafood Watch app got a social upgrade, which lets users contribute information about where they have actually found sustainable seafood for sale.

Like mobile social health applications such as RunKeeper, this is one of the more interesting interpretations of making a function social.

In the new Seafood Watch app, a feature called “Project FishMap” allows users to tag restaurants and markets across the United States to note what specific sustainable seafood is offered, and earn (of course!) virtual badges for their contributions. And users can also load up the app when deciding where to eat, so they can make their decision based on where sustainable seafood is available.

Eventually, perhaps, this user-generated seafood map could be made available for incorporation into other local apps like Yelp. But for now, the aquarium is just promising that an Android app will be released next year.

The idea behind the Seafood Watch project has been to enable consumers to show their preference by asking for sustainable options and voting for them with their wallets. But sometimes trying to make a better choice can get awfully confusing, when, for instance, the waiter at a restaurant has no idea where the cod came from (Atlantic wild-caught cod=”avoid”; Alaska longline cod=”best choice”).

However, the aquarium says the program has been effective in lobbying larger businesses–food service companies Compass Group and Aramark have committed to purchasing sustainable seafood, and Whole Foods Market has begun labeling its seafood with the project’s recommendations.

“We are modeling for Apple to sell an incremental 2.5 million iPhones with the addition of Verizon, which may be conservative,” Munster explains. “We are modeling for iPhone units at AT&T to be down 30 percent year-over-year in 2011 as the US mix shifts towards Verizon, and as AT&T subs wait to upgrade their iPhones until they are off-contract and can purchase an iPhone on Verizon.”

Interesting, yeah? There is a caveat, though. If iPhone sales at AT&T remain flat year-over-year in 2011, Verizon may see as many iPhones next year as its rival did in calendar 2010. And that would add another 10 million units to Munster’s 2011 iPhone estimate. So: Nine million or 19 million.

That jibes with what I’d heard in October, as well as with reporting this week from TechCrunch. And there’s a decent chance that Google will be showing off more than just a store that day. Engadget, for starters, thinks we’ll see a Google-branded netbook designed for Chrome that day as well.

As far as the store goes: My understanding is that the marketplace, designed to showcase Web apps, will be available for anyone who’s using the beta version of the Chrome browser. So the rest of you have a couple of days to upgrade.

UPDATE: There you go: — Google’s Chrome Team just announced a media event to “share some exciting news about Chrome” on Tuesday, Dec. 7.

The second key feature is copy and paste. While not the biggest deal for many customers, it is an omission in Windows Phone 7 that early adopters and reporters have given Microsoft plenty of grief about. Adding this feature should end that and put another tick in the feature check box for those comparing Windows Phone 7 side by side with iPhone and Android. (Now it just needs full multitasking, visual voicemail and a couple of other things.)

Officially, Microsoft is saying only that the update is due “in early 2011″ and will be the first of many regular updates to the operating system.

So how is Windows Phone 7 selling? It’s a little early to say definitively. There have been a couple of reports suggesting slow sales, but they are also based on very small data sets. For example, British phone retailer Mobilesplease says it is seeing Windows Phone 7 being outsold 15 to 1 by Android and 3 to 1 by Symbian-based devices. However, those numbers are based on sales data covering just a couple thousand phone sales.

Enthusiast site WMPoweruser tried to suss things out a bit by measuring how many Facebook activations there have been for Windows Phone 7 and came up with a figure of around 135,000. (Facebook support is built in to the operating system, but not all users choose to link their Facebook account to the phone). There’s also the fact that both T-Mobile and AT&T are offering “buy one, get one free” promotions on Windows Phone 7 devices. That could be a bad sign, but this is the holidays and carriers tend to like getting two users in a household and are willing to put some marketing money behind those efforts.

An AT&T spokesman, meanwhile, told Mobilized that the company has been pleased with Windows Phone 7 sales thus far, though neither he nor Microsoft would go into any specifics.

So what does all this mean? It’s hard to say. It’s clearly not a home run, with the phones selling so fast that stores can’t keep them in stock. At the same time, it is probably not the Kin-scale flop that some predicted either. (I know that doesn’t narrow things down too much. If anyone out there has more data, I’m all ears.)

Also of note, as of Wednesday there is one more Windows Phone 7 device to consider during these holidays, though you will have to go online or to one of a handful of Microsoft retail stores to find one. Dell is ready with its previously shown Venue Pro device. The rugged phone, which runs on T-Mobile’s network and features a vertical slide-out keyboard, will come in 8GB and 16GB versions.

The Venue Pro (seen above) is getting the most aggressive pricing of the early Windows Phones, starting at just $99 for the 8GB version when bought along with a new two-year contract. Those upgrading will have to pay $199, while it will sell for $449 without a contract at all. The 16GB version is priced $50 higher in all cases.

According to October 2010 figures from research company Nielsen, the iPhone is now tied with the BlackBerry as the most popular smartphone in the U.S. with 27 percent of the market each (Android devices claim nearly 23 percent and Windows Mobile 14 percent). But the iPhone is also the most desired device among likely smartphone upgraders in the U.S., ahead of Android. Among users planning to buy a new smartphone, 35 percent chose the iPhone, while 28 percent chose Android.

One last interesting data point: Nielsen found that men prefer Android over iOS (33 percent vs. 29 percent), while women tend to gravitate toward iOS (31 percent vs. 23 percent).

Insert your own stereotype-based jokes here.

Good thing AT&T Wireless CEO Ralph de la Vega is so certain the end of the carrier’s iPhone exclusivity deal doesn’t portend a mass subscriber exodus, otherwise you might look at AT&T’s latest earnings and the degree to which they were driven by the device and (cough) worry.

Reporting third quarter financials largely in line with Wall Street’s forecasts, AT&T said today it activated 5.2 million iPhones in the quarter–62 percent more than the record 3.2 million it activated earlier this year. Odd then that the device is notably absent from the “Mobile Broadband Leadership” slide in AT&T’s investor presentation. A passive-aggressive jab back at that “rumored” Verizon deal, perhaps?

Anyway…

The company posted a profit of 55 cents per share, up 3.8 percent from the 53 cents per share it managed in the third quarter of 2009 and in line with what analysts had been expecting. Revenue rose to $31.58 billion from $30.73 billion in the same period a year earlier and slightly exceeded the average analyst expectation of $31.25 billion.

So a strong quarter, but one overshadowed by that long-rumored loss of iPhone exclusivity. As Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett observed in a note to investors this morning, the heavy subsidies AT&T offers for the iPhone cut deeply into its bottom line.

“In anticipation of losing exclusivity, AT&T has rapidly served up its own inoculation–a massive campaign to upgrade existing iPhone subscribers to new two year contracts that will lock them in as new options emerge,” he wrote. “The cost of this strategy, of course, is subsidies, and that cost was front and center in AT&T’s 3Q results. In total, Wireless margins were light, but Wireline cost cutting was better-than-expected, and overall earnings were therefore in line at $0.55.”

“We believe that like netbooks, tablets will expand the term for computing overall with a new form factor and new uses that bring computing to even more aspects of our lives,” Otellini said during the call. “Will they impact PC sales? Sure. At the margin, they probably will. Consumers will have a limited amount of discretionary income and some will choose to purchase a tablet instead of upgrading an existing PC or purchasing a netbook in any given period. We saw the same thing happen when netbooks were introduced, but three years later, both the PC and the netbook market segments have grown substantially and we believe that will happen again with tablets.”

Given that, what does Intel (INTC) plan to do to gain a little more presence in the category?

“We are deeply engaged with a number of partners to bring to market innovative tablet solutions,” he explained. “Our design win momentum is very strong, and in the coming months and quarters, you will see Intel solutions that run on Windows, Android and MeeGo operating systems across a variety of form factors and price points. We fully expect to participate broadly and profitably in this category, and that in the end, the tablet category will be additive to our bottom line and not take away from it.”

“We are the only architecture that runs all of the major–all but one of the major tablet operating systems, we don’t yet run on Apple,” he added. “So I think we’re in a pretty good space.”

We don’t yet run on Apple? Is that just wishful thinking or…eh, never mind.

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• Intel: Tablet Market Will Grow Between 73 Percent and 88 Percent by 2014