Masochistic, loyal or just plain lazy?  RIM has announced preliminary trend expectations for subscriber numbers over this latest quarter (which doesn’t officially end until March 1st) and it turns out that despite a couple of outages, they’re estimating the eventual growth figure total to hit around 2.1 million – that’s up from original predictions of 1.8 million.  However the company remains cagey about financial performance, maintaining their December predictions of in the range of $1.80 – $1.87 billion. 

“BlackBerry smartphones proved to be a big hit throughout the holiday selling season and we’re pleased to see RIM’s business momentum continuing in the new year.  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” Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO, RIM

The total BlackBerry user base is expected to be around 14 million by March 1st. 

[via MobileBurn]