So here’s the thing about the smartphone market: there are way too many of them.

The year 2010, JMP Securities analyst Samuel Wilson asserted in a report this morning, “should be the year of the shakeout in smartphones.” He believes most of the market share and carrier focus will consolidate around three vendors. His view is that two of the winners “have effectively already been chosen.” In that group he includes Research In Motion (RIMM), “already a leader with its strong market presence” with a focus on the enterprise, and Apple (AAPL), driven by the App Store, iTunes and a strong Web browser.

So who will take the third slot?

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In theory, getting users to ditch one Internet search engine for another should be an easy sell. But doing so is likely to cost Microsoft (MSFT) every penny of the roughly $100 million it plans to spend on an advertising campaign that starts Wednesday for its new Bing search engine.

In economist speak, there are virtually no “switching costs” for a consumer that wants to change from one search engine to another, other than the burden of typing Bing.com into a Web browser instead of Google.com (GOOG). That’s nothing compared to the switching costs of a company changing a complex piece of enterprise software, which may require employee retraining, or a consumer who switches to a new operating system, requiring the purchase of new application programs.

In reality, of course, habit and inertia make it very challenging for a company like Microsoft to improve its 8 percent share of the search market against rivals like Google and Yahoo (YHOO). There’s also the problem that most people say they’re happy with their experience on Internet search engines today, though some of their online behavior–for example, the large amount of time they spend on typical searches–suggests otherwise, according to Microsoft’s research.

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Microsoft (MSFT) is about to face a test of whether it can finally put the brakes on its loss of market-share in Web browsers.

The company is expected to release a final version of Internet Explorer 8 this week, a new Web browser that consists mostly of small improvements designed to make surfing the Internet more productive, rather than radical overhauls. For example, a new feature called “accelerators” eliminates extra mouse clicks by letting users highlight text on a Web page and automatically search for the terms on Facebook, eBay (EBAY) and various map Web sites.

Microsoft needs Internet Explorer 8 to reverse or halt its market-share slide. Between February of this year and last year, Internet Explorer lost nearly 7.5 percentage points of browser market-share to competitors, according to Net Applications, a company that monitors the types of browsers people are running when they visit Web sites. IE fell to 67.4 percent of the market in February from 74.9 percent a year earlier, while Mozilla’s Firefox jumped to 21.8 percent from 17.27 percent, and Apple’s (AAPL) Safari rose to eight percent from 5.7 percent, Net Applications estimates.

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One odd thing about the current state of the wireless phone market is that while demand for handsets seems to be in free fall–Canaccord Adams’s latest forecast, for instance, has 2009 units down 26 percent–the U.S. wireless carriers all seem fairly upbeat on their growth prospects for 2009.

Indeed, Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett today notes in a research piece called “U.S. Wireless ’09: A Recipe For Disaster?” that every U.S. wireless carrier thinks it is so well-positioned that it will take market share in 2009–but of course, that’s not possible.

Moffett adds that the situation is made trickier still by the fact that “the size of the pie is shrinking rapidly.” He says U.S. wireless industry subscriber growth was just 5.9 percent in 2008, and will fall below three percent growth in 2009. Moffett adds that subscriber growth has been falling at an accelerating rate: In Q1 2008, net additions were down 16.1 percent; by Q4, net additions were falling 38.8 percent.

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Nokia (NOK) this morning warned that it now expects its mobile device market share in the third quarter to be down from the second quarter. The company had previously said it expected its share of the market to be sequentially flat.

Nokia said it continues to target an increase in share for the full year.

The company also said it expects the overall mobile device market this year to be “impacted by the weaker consumer confidence in multiple markets,” although it still expects device volume to grow 10 percent or more from 1.14 billion units last year. Nokia said it still expects industry units to be up sequentially in Q3, but lower than previously expected.

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Google will have 90% search market share in the U.S. one year from now. That’s an insane prediction, I was told, after I made it in front of a half dozen of the most important public market investors in the tech world at a conference recently. It was midnight and folks were on their second or third Macallan 25, but folks immediately sobered up. How on earth would Google raise its U.S. market share 20 points in one year–that’s impossible, one person replied. The perfect storm recently arrived and, after all, Google jumped 10% over the last year. Frankly, I don’t see why the Google market-share train wouldn’t accelerate, given the following factors …

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Earlier today we noted that two different Web metrics showed MySpace losing ground and remarked that the News Corp. unit, which normally works hard to promote growth statistics, hadn’t squawked in protest. Two hours later came this press release: “MYSPACE MARKET SHARE GROWS IN TYPICALLY INACTIVE PERIOD.”

We’re running the full release at the end of the story, but we’ll sum it up here: The headline isn’t accurate–there’s no data showing MySpace’s market share increasing.

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