Motorola’s RAZR stood atop cellular handsets in the US, in terms of sales, for the past 3 years. Well as of today, it stands no longer. According to the market research firm NPD, enter in our new #1: iPhone 3G.

Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for NPD said:

“The displacement of the RAZR by the iPhone 3G represents a watershed shift in handset design from fashion to fashionable functionality, four of the five best-selling handsets in the third quarter were optimized for messaging and other advanced Internet features.”

It seems U.S. consumers are looking for a few good but common features. 43 percent of consumers stated they needed a camera, while another 36 percent needed the ability to send SMS messages. Phones with a physical QWERTY keyboard showed the greatest year-over-year rise in sales. 30 percent of devices sold happened to have QWERTY keyboards, which was up 11 percent from the previous year.

All of this news coming days after it was announced that Apple has taken the number 2 smartphone spot away from RIM. And that is worldwide, not just in the US. Life must be grand for Steve Jobs…

It has taken Apple a very short time to reach this position, would it be wise to assume that it is only a matter of time for it to become #1 worldwide?

[Via Appleinsider]

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Motorola RAZR Takes Back Seat to the New #1: iPhone 3G!

The iMac case went from white plastic to aluminum and glass, and the iPhone went from aluminum and glass to black plastic. Or white plastic to show off you got a premium 16GB version, just like the high-end MacBook is only in black.

None of that is coincidence. As technical advances slow and feature creep becomes more of a crawl, electronics is shifting from being all about the speeds and feeds and becoming more about the fashions and faux-pas.

Apple knows this and a new study shows consumers are driving it:

In another study by Rubicon Consulting, the firm asked iPhone owners “When you got your iPhone, what model of mobile phone, if any, did it replace?” The findings are quite interesting. Unsurprisingly, many of the replaced models are high-end smartphones like Windows Mobile phones (14%), Blackberries (13%) and Palm (7%) devices. However, almost a quarter (24%) of respondents upgraded to their iPhone having previously owned a Motorola RAZR.

RAZR was once the trendy new chic in town, now the iPhone is becoming the go-to-device. Though hopefully we aren’t — and will never be — at the level of thousand dollar designer pumps and purses, the same study does show the price consumers are willing to pay for their fashionable handsets has gone up by $9 over the last six months alone.

Swords being double-edges, however, the sheer market share lost from RAZR to iPhone and the current problems facing Motorola show that, increasingly, no company may be more than one hot handset away from either blinding success or abysmal failure.

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iPhone is the New Fashion (or Buh-bye Moto)