Is there a company with a greater rabbit-to-hat ratio than Research in Motion (RIMM)? The Blackberry maker yesterday announced astonishing preliminary third quarter results, including a hefty 49% jump in revenue over last year's third quarter. Moreover, the Ontario-based company says that it addded 875,000 new Blackberry subscribers during the quarter, smashing their - and indeed everyone's - projections.

How do they do it? Ask your friends who've been using a Blackberry for years, and you'll hear little more than curse-laden complaints about the device's clunkiness. Skeptics have long predicted that the Treo and other handheld devices would surpass the Blackberry, and the company has been plagued by patent disputes. Even yesterday's statement noted that RIM "is completing a management-initiated, voluntary review of RIM's historical option granting practices," which sounds like a precursor to someone spending more time with his family. (UPDATE: The New York Times posted a good story on Christmas day concerning the company's reticence on the options question.) After some initial euphoria in after-hours trading Thursday, RIM stock was in the red by midday Friday.

But only the foolhardy would count this company out. Over at Bloggingstocks,
Eric Buscemi attributes RIM's continued success to the fact that "selling a wireless data device is difficult and barriers to entry high". Well...yes. But The Browser thinks the real key here is that RIM managed to do a thing we thought we'd never see: they cracked the foreign market. Europeans and, to a lesser extent, Asians were never as interested in non-phone devices (like pagers) as Americans were; if they want portable e-mail and Web capability, they want 'em on their phones. That, we thought, meant that Blackberrys would never catch on - who wants to carry around two devices?

But RIM was a step ahead of us; not only does The Pearl totally pass as a phone, but beginning in 2004, RIM began licensing its services to phone companies abroad, so you didn't need to own a Blackberry in order to have Blackberry functions. Those steps have paid off handsomely; according to RIM CFO Dennis Kavelman in Thursday's research call, a full 27% of RIM sales now come from outside North America. And so, as much as we still think the stock's ridiculously overpriced, there is still ample room for this company to grow.