Despite a 123% improvement in sales, the iPhone is apparently still no match for the tried and tested BlackBerry Curve 83xx series. Based on a study conducted by the NPD group, RIM’s BlackBerry Curve 83xx series was the best selling smartphone for Q1 of 2009.
The slight slow down in sales of the iPhone 3G made it slip to no. 2 in the rankings while the 3rd and 4th spot were also occupied by RIM with their Storm and Pearl series (with exception of the Flip) respectively. The Android T-Mobile G1 phone was at 5th place. It’s not surprising that most of the smartphones in the top 5 are from RIM since they actually managed to ship 7.8 million BlackBerry phones from December of last year to February of 2009.
Of course, with a new iPhone lurking in the horizon, things might change in favor of Apple. However, RIM also has a couple of new BlackBerry handsets such as the Curve 8520 Gemini set to debut soon as well, so we can’t really count RIM out just yet. One thing’s for sure though, this battle between RIM and Apple will certainly go down the wire.
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