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Research In Motion recently said that it expected to add 1.82 million customers to its BlackBerry line of smartphones during its fourth fiscal quarter, which ends next week. That’s a rather aggressive forecast, considering all of Verizon Wireless added 2.0 million customers in its fourth quarter. That’s an entire wireless carrier — second largest in terms of subscribers in the U.S. — that RIM is approaching. (Though not in total; Verizon has 63.7 million subscribers total.) Now, however, the forecast has changed…in the positive. They now expect to add 15 to 20 percent more than that (!!).

For those of you without a calculator handy, that’s 2.1 to 2.22 million subscribers in just one quarter. It’s not quite AT&T’s 2.7 million fourth quarter additions, but it’s still a remarkable total for a handset maker, rather than a wireless carrier.

Here’s an interesting bit:

According to Canalys, RIM is the second largest smartphone vendor in the world behind Nokia, having more than doubled shipments of BlackBerrys from the fourth quarter of 2006 to the same period last year. In this country, it has 41 percent of the “smart converged device” market, which isn’t exactly a standard term but generally means a phone capable of more than basic texting and browsing.

Some of this should serve as a solace to RIM as they face scrutiny from a few outages. If they do end up with 2.2 million subscribers in the fourth quarter, it would be a huge coup for the company.

[CNET News]

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