iPhone becomes top handset in U.S., passing RAZR

9:45 AM, November 10, 2008

Move over, Motorola. The iPhone has shaved away your lead in the mobile phone market, passing the RAZR to become the top handset purchased by U.S. adult consumers in the third quarter of 2008, according to the research firm NPD Group. The RAZR had held onto the top spot for 12 quarters.

Consumers are buying more iPhones than RAZRs because there is a "watershed shift in handset design from fashion to fashionable functionality," said Ross Rubin, NPD's director of industry analysis. That means consumers don't care only about looking cool anymore -- they want to look cool with a phone that doesn't have an 18% failure rate.

Research In Motion's Blackberry Curve came in third in NPD's ranking. A different report last week, from Canalys, found that the iPhone had passed RIM and Motorola to gain a 17.3% share in the smartphone market. That report showed Nokia still hanging onto first place globally. RIM could be hurting because the Blackberry has twice the failure rate of the iPhone.

Still, according to NPD, the jump in iPhone sales wasn't enough to stave off a slowdown in U.S. phone sales overall. Phone purchases declined 15% in the third quarter from the same period last year. Revenue fell 10%.

It's unclear if the iPhone rush will continue: NPD said mobile phones with QWERTY keyboards saw the greatest year-over-year rise in sales. About 30% of handsets sold in the third quarter had QWERTY keyboards. And as all of us fat-fingered people know, a tactile keyboard is not one of the iPhone's many assets.

Motorola Aura brings back the SwitchBlade design

Looking like a blast from the past, the new Motorola Aura is bringing back into fashion the old switchblade design and pimps it out to great new heights.

The Aura has a grade 1 62-carat sapphire crystal lens to protect its screen, a stainless steel body that has been electro- and hand polished, and Swiss-made and custom-engineered rotating mechanism with 130 precision ball bearings. Plainly put, this is one well crafted mobile phone for the discerning buyer. Unfortunately, as luxury phones often go, you won’t find high-end features on this baby. It only comes with a 2-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, EDGE, and text and e-mail capabilities which is about as standard as it gets when dealing with mid-range mobile phones of today.

So, how much will this baby cost? You can land yourself one if you’ve got $1,999 to spare. Look for it to be released anytime now as its scheduled availability date is in the beginning of the 4th quarter of 2008 which is just right about now. Will it be available locally? I don’t see why not though an exact date of its release is anybody’s guess at the moment.

Say Hi to Moto Rokr Phones

Say goodbye to the RAZR days, and say hello to the ROKR era. That’s apparently the message Motorola is sending across to consumers as they unleash a new set of ROKR phones to flood the market.

ROKR EM30 ROKR EM28ROKR EM25

Inheriting some of the design features of the pioneering E8 model; the EM30, EM25, and EM28 might not offer groundbreaking technology, but comes with most of the music capabilities one would expect from this flourishing line of phones from Motorola. The EM30 probably resembles the E8 the most albeit the absence of a touch-sensitive click-wheel. It does, however, retain the ModeShift feature and is Windows Media compatible. The EM28 is the clamshell variant while the EM25 is the slider version. Both won’t feature the morphing ModeShift keypad, but offers plenty of style to go around.

All three ROKR phones are expected to be released this quarter globally.