Busy day in tech yesterday, with Android Central running a never-ending live blog, covering everything from the new Motorola RAZR to the Galaxy Nexus, to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). If there's a common hardware thread to be had, it's that Android continues to spit out phones that are big, thin, and as wedged as an iPhone 5 rumor. The Galaxy Nexus in fact, with a 4.65 inch screen looks big enough for me to hollow out and use as an iPhone 4S case. Pretty much top-tier components all around, including innovative features like NFC beam for content sharing and facial recognition-based unlocking. The camera seems strangely weak, however, and Super AMOLED while bright and beautiful still doesn't seem as well balanced as LED.

As to RAZR, where's the flip? My old RAZR flipped. Just saying...

ICS seems to deliver on the promise of merging phone-bound Gingerbread to tablet-bound Honeycomb, creating a consistent UI that scales across the vast range of Android device sizes. It looks like they finally let Matias Duarte -- the designer of webOS who went over to Google -- loose to interesting effect. There's a new font, which clones Helvetica better than Microsoft's Arial ever did, and now looks very close the iPhone's current Helvetica Neue. It's also decidedly un-skeuomorphic, with flat, untextured regions that are deliberately unlike iOS. (We'll talk more about that on the next Iterate. The lack of clear differentiation between smaller screen phone and larger screen tablet apps could be either brilliant or baffling. We'll have to see.

Meanwhile over at BlackBerry DevCon 11, CrackBerry sat through the longest. Presentation. Ever. Seriously, it had an intermission. RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis hosted most of it, almost like Regis Filbin doing a gadget segment, but the technology they showed off was really impressive. Everything from the new QNX-based BBX operating system to the Torch-powered HTML5 engine to the TAT-driven new Cascade UI and framework elements show that while RIM did fall behind, they're investing heavily in getting ahead. The developer story remains a little overwhelming -- yes, there can be too many options -- but the focus on results seems better. Much of this will make it's way into BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0. Sadly, no new BBX superphones were so much as previewed. Yet.

With iOS 5 and iPhone 4S here, the competition isn't giving Apple any breathing room, and a ton of new devices are already hurtling towards us like a fleet of Star Destroyers.

Check out all the Android and BlackBerry coverage and then jump back here and tell us if any of it tempts you away from iOS.

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]

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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