Research In Motion (RIM) signed up its one millionth subscriber five years after introducing its first BlackBerry wireless handheld. Ten months later, last November, the company eclipsed that record by notching up its second million users.

Today, after only another six months, the vendor reports the addition of yet another million users. That’s three million subscribers for a platform that existed below the radar of most consumers and analysts for most of its history.

Should we expect to hear that another million people have gone BlackBerry in the next three to four months? I wouldn't bet against it.

Research firm Canalys reported BlackBerry shipments doubled from 379,990 during first quarter 2004 to 758,300 for the same period this year. RIM placed fourth behind Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm as the number four Smart Device (PDAs & smartphones) platform, while it jumped to number two as the third bestselling manufacturer after Nokia and palmOne.

Also, Gartner recently revealed research where RIM supplanted palmOne as the top PDA vendor with a 75.6 percent increase in shipments. (Gartner includes cellular-wireless handhelds in its PDA statistics, rather than merging them with smartphones like some other analysts do. By the same token, devices like palmOne's popular Treo series, aren't included.)

Background
Few would have predicted a couple of years go that RIM would be in the position it is today. Yet over the course of its recent history, the company introduced several new BlackBerry handhelds and one particular innovative smartphone series, 7100—handsets that nix the traditional BlackBerry thumb-keyboard and boxy design for something decidedly sleeker with a new keypad/keyboard combo that leverages predictive software to ease text input.

RIM aggressively pursued partnerships with carriers from around the world to expand into many new countries and channels. And it seemed like every other week the company would announce its entry into a new market.

In addition, RIM revved up its licensing programs to deliver BlackBerry services to other device manufacturer's handhelds and smartphones, added support for Novell GroupWise to its enterprise server, and even previewed a new handheld for Wi-Fi networks. The company also settled its legal hassles and patent dispute with NTP for $450 million.

The last few years also saw RIM move away from the pager networks used for its original handhelds to cellular networks supported by wireless carriers. By gaining the support of mobile operators, it opened up a much larger potential market, with the power and brand recognition that came with partnering with carriers as an added bonus. This also allowed RIM to change its handhelds from glorified pagers into the full-fledged wireless-handhelds and smartphones we know now.

It took time, but corporate America finally began accepting wireless messaging (IM and e-mail) as something that could be good for business and not just a drain on the bottom line. As a result, enterprises that were in the process of testing wireless solutions in pilot programs decided mobile technology was worth their investment. This resulted in a lot more BlackBerry deployments than had been seen previously.

In fact, Gartner asserted in its recent report that the demand for wireless e-mail, RIM's specialty, is what helped handheld sales grow by 25 percent during the first quarter of 2005 compared to the same period a year earlier.