[Terrigno]

Dont know if this was posted. But I seen it on Yahoo News about 3 hours ago.


NPD Group reports that an aggressive buy-one-get-one promotion helped the BlackBerry Curve move past Apple's iPhone to become the best-selling consumer smartphone in the U.S. during the first quarter.

Blackberry maker Research In Motion increased its share of the U.S. smartphone market to 50 percent in the quarter -- up 15 percentage points from the previous three months, the research firm said. By contrast, the market shares of both Apple and Palm declined 10 percent.

RIM's success was largely due to Verizon's aggressive marketing of the BlackBerry Storm and its buy-one-get-one BlackBerry promotion to its large customer base, explained NPD Group Director Ross Rubin. "The more familiar, and less expensive, Curve benefited from these giveaways and was able to leapfrog the iPhone due to its broader availability on the four major U.S. national carriers," Rubin said.

Priming the Pump

Confronted with reduced consumer demand for replacement handsets, the nation's top wireless carriers have decided to put more emphasis on data-centric devices that can help drive revenue growth even in the midst of a recession. To prime the pump, Verizon and its rivals have become far more open to raising their handset subsidies in order to keep the initial purchase price as low as possible.

"The trend centers on both subsidies as well as the marketing of their data and messaging plans, and we are starting to see more options," said IDC Senior Research Analyst Ryan Reith. Though the carriers already have 'all you can eat' data plans, "a lot of consumers are still looking for the happy sweet spot in the middle," he explained.

Even as the overall market dropped 15.8 percent in the first quarter, smartphone shipments into North America grew four percent, Reith reported last month. "Creativity appears to be the key to success" for large mobile operators during this tough time as changes to business practices from past years have become necessary, he noted.

"We are also starting to see the carriers make shifts in their product portfolios, with some having smartphones represent up to 50 percent of the total, up from 20 percent last year," Reith explained. "And we are seeing the launch of low-end quick-messaging devices."

A New Competitive Dynamic

According to NPD, 45 percent of U.S. handset users still prefer to use their mobile devices to make calls over surfing the Internet or accessing multimedia. "Increasingly consumers are purchasing phones with advanced capabilities that go far beyond voice calling, but only those who take advantage of these features offer the best revenue potential for carriers," Rubin said.

On the other hand, consumers who rely on their handsets primarily for voice "tend to skew older," Rubin noted. By contrast, smartphones are the products of choice for "younger affluent users, who tend to deliver the highest ARPU (average revenue per user) for the carriers," he said.

Overall, NPD reports that smartphones -- which represented just 17 percent of handset sales volume a year ago -- now make up 23 percent of U.S. handset sales. Moreover, the top five models sold in the first quarter were the Blackberry Curve, Apple's iPhone 3G, the Blackberry Storm, the Blackberry Pearl, and the T-Mobile G1, which runs Google's Android mobile platform.

Reith believes RIM has succeeded in increasing its U.S. market share because it offers multimedia devices that touch all areas of the marketplace. "This poses a tough challenge to rivals," Reith said. "Though Apple's iPhone has been successful, it is just one device from one manufacturer."

EDIT: Noticed its in the News and Rumers forum also.