An astonishing bit of news has come out of a recently released financial research note from William Blair. According to the sources of analyst Anil Doradla, the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx has displaced the iPhone 4S as the bestselling smartphone at Verizon Wireless, Barron’s reported. The iPhone has always been the top smartphone at every North American carrier it has landed on, so for another vendor—in particular a struggling Motorola Mobility—to displace it is quite a feat.
Of course, long before there was an iPhone, Motorola held the title of the world’s iconic device maker. Its Razr phones—and StarTACs before them—were the cutting edge in industrial design, leading customers to buy more than 100 million of the suckers. But Motorola failed to find a suitable replacement for the Razr line, choosing instead to keep retreading the design until it became a bit of a joke (remember the Krzr?).