"BlackBerry smartphones proved to be a big hit throughout the holiday selling season," said RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie. "The seasonal slowdown in net subscriber account additions that we expected in the new year did not occur and our focused execution with partners has continued to produce strong results within both enterprise and consumer segments."

Growing Pains

RIM's global listing of where its Blackberry handsets are being deployed resembles a world atlas. In the past two months alone, the company has announced deals with carriers in Bangladesh, France, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Lithuania, Madagascar, Mexico, the Netherlands, Qatar, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Uganda. But even as Blackberries proliferate, the company has had more complaints about service outages.

Two of the outages occurred this month. Industry analysts attributed these snafus to the fact that all Blackberry traffic must pass through the company's servers and network operations center (NOC) in Canada.

Every mobile -service operator "has a NOC, and it is every carrier's bread and butter to make sure that it is up and running," said Godfrey Chua, IDC wireless research manager. On the other hand, Chua said all communications services are subject to outages, even on regular cell phones.

"RIM probably gets a little bit more attention than others because what they do is so specific and it's what they are known for," Chua said in a telephone interview. "It was a big deal last week at the Mobile World Congress because so many of the people attending were carrying RIM handsets and couldn't get access to their e-mail."

Legal Woes

The latest market data from Canalys shows RIM was the world's second-biggest shipper of smartphones after Nokia in the final calendar quarter of 2007. Moreover, the Blackberry maker easily held onto the No. 1 spot in North America with a 41 percent market share for the quarter.

Still, not everything is coming up roses at RIM. Despite the subscriber boost, the company expects two key business metrics to be the same as it forecast at the start of the quarter: revenue of $1.80 billion to $1.87 billion and earnings per share of 66 to 70 cents.

Legal woes also promise to place demands on RIM's attention and financial resources. Unable to resolve a dispute on cross licensing, RIM and Motorola accuse the other of patent infringement in lawsuits before U.S. District Courts in Texas and Delaware.

According to the International Herald Tribune, RIM's suit accuses Motorola of "demanding exorbitant royalties" for patents considered "essential to various standards for mobile wireless telecommunications and wireless computing that RIM practices." The Blackberry maker also complained that Motorola is refusing to pay royalties on RIM's patents.