Monday, wireless research group NPD released a report revealing that Apple Incorporated’s iPhone 3G had become the top-selling handset throughout the United States amongst adult customers, thus having outrun the Motorola RAZR phone.

Until this fiscal quarter, the latter gadget had been the one in highest demand from American customers for a period of twelve quarters. Now the runner-up, Motorola RAZR is followed by Research In Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry Curve and LG’s the Rumor and enV2 models.

Nevertheless, NPD group has also informed that handset sales had been on a downwards path during the third quarter of the 2008 fiscal year, having registered a decrease by 15 percent from the 32 million units that were sold last year within the same time-frame.

Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for NPD, stated that the tipping of the scale in favour of the iPhone over the RAZR translated as the customers’ tendency to switch their focus from fashion per se in a handset’s design to fashionable functionality.

Research performed by the NPD group showed that 43 percent of smartphone users needed that their handset be fitted with a camera, while 36 percent of them established being able to send and receive text messages as the first demand a phone had to meet.

During the fourth-quarter of this fiscal year, Apple sold 6.8 million units of their iPhone 3G, which rendered the company to have achieved their goal of selling over 10 million iPhones during the 2008 calendar year.

Apple Incorporated released the iPhone 3G on July 11, 2008, after the original model of the smartphone, which was introduced on June 29, 2007 in the United States, was named Invention of the Year by Time magazine.