RIM ups its subscriber tally

Research in Motion on Thursday confirmed its outlook for its fiscal fourth quarter and expects to add more subscribers than initially projected.

RIM said it expect fourth quarter subscriber additions to be 15 percent to 20 percent higher than the 1.82 million it projected in December. There should be about 14 million BlackBerry subscribers by the end of the quarter.

In a statement, RIM said BlackBerry devices continue to sell well. Fourth quarter revenue and earnings will be in line with previous projections with revenue in the range of $1.8 billion to $1.87 billion. Earnings per share in the quarter are expected to be 66 cents a share to 70 cents a share.

The news comes as RIM has been suffering with outages of late so this subscriber count could be construed as a bit of damage control. Obviously, RIM wanted to send a message that the outages haven't impacted the popularity of the BlackBerry. See Russell Shaw's BlackBerry Beat for the full account of the saga.