According to a recently published report coming from The NPD Group, a leading wireless industry market research firm, Apple’s iPhone has lost the first position in the top of the best-selling consumer smartphones in the U.S. for the first quarter of the ongoing year, and its place has been taken by RIM’s BlackBerry Curve. According to the report, RIM’s smartphone was helped in taking the lead by a “buy-one-get-one” promotion from Verizon Wireless.

It seems that RIM not only managed to have one of its devices as the best-selling mobile phone for the quarter, but the company also gained up to 50 percent of the smartphone market in the US for the time frame, an impressive increase compared to the 15 percent market share it accounted for in the fourth quarter of 2008. In addition, it seems that both Apple and Palm saw their market share going down 10 percent each.

The top-five best-selling smartphones in the US during the first three months of the year included RIM BlackBerry Curve (all 83XX models), Apple iPhone 3G (all models), RIM BlackBerry Storm, RIM BlackBerry Pearl (all models, except flip) and T-Mobile G1.

“Verizon Wireless’s aggressive marketing of the BlackBerry Storm and its buy-one-get-one BlackBerry promotion to its large customer base contributed to RIM capturing three of the top five positions,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at The NPD Group. “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.”

At the same time, the report also showed that smartphones managed to gain more market share in the mobile phone segment, and that now they account for about 23 percent of sales, compared to the 17 percent of handset sales volume they accounted for back in the first quarter of 2008. “Even in this challenging economy, consumers are migrating toward Web-capable handsets and their supporting data plans to access more information and entertainment on the go,” Rubin said. More details on the report can be found on The NPD Group's website.