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

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.

Resource - latimes

More BlackBerry app store details emerge

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Mike Lazaridis, Research In Motion's co-founder and co-CEO, has just given the 700 registered developers at the first-ever BlackBerry Developer Conference sound but strange advice. The key to successful BlackBerry development isn't just good programming, Lazaridis told the room, it's physics.

Very specific physics, it turns out. Lazaridis pointed to an image of a box with the words Bandwidth, Capacity, Performance, and Battery Life, written in each corner. These are the four principles of BlackBerry's "physics," he said. If developers push too hard to achieve high broadband speeds, for instance, capacity drops. On individual devices, there is a trade-off between battery life and performance.

"This is one box that it's wise not to think outside," Lazaridis joked.

Lazaridis' insight is one reason that scores of developers have gathered at the Silicon Valley conference. Another is meeting with technical experts for hands-on advice to ready their applications for the sleek BlackBerry Bold and touch-screen BlackBerry Storm--slated to hit stores within the next few weeks--and for the BlackBerry application store--anticipated to debut in March 2009.

The on-device BlackBerry Application Center and online BlackBerry Application Storefront will make it easier for the 20 million BlackBerry users on all platforms to find and download add-on applications for their specific phone models.

Applications for AOL, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Gmail, and Windows Live Hotmail are among others soon available; developers can also submit their code for inclusion in the store as early as December.

Application authors will get to keep 80 percent of the proceeds, RIM said in a statement, while the other 20 percent goes, presumably, to RIM and to the carriers, when users download applications from the carrier-controlled store on their phone.

RIM also announced an in-progress partnership with PayPal that makes the online bill pay company likely as the prevailing payment system for purchases made on the online Blackberry Application Storefront.

BlackBerry's browser forms another part of the application story. The version 4.6 browser packaged in the BlackBerry Bold, for instance, will operate much more like a desktop browser, with greater support for CSS, Ajax, HTML, XHTML, and DOM L2 code. This is a move that RIM hopes will attract even more application developers to populate the online and on-device stores, particularly those more experienced in programming to Web standards.

Resource - CNET