A week ago today, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said his channel checks showed that the Q10 has been pretty well-received by consumers, and said he expects Q10 sales to offset a slowdown in sales of its touchscreen-only predecessor, the Z10.

Then, on Thursday, Societe Generale analyst Andy Perkins raised his rating on BlackBerry to “buy” from “sell,” saying Q10 sales will reach almost one million in the fiscal first quarter. Add those to the four million Z10s that Perkins expects BlackBerry to sell, and that’s five million BB10 handsets total for Q1, which is above the current consensus of three million to four million units for the quarter.

Today comes more good news: Wells Fargo analyst Maynard Um has issued a positive note on BlackBerry, observing that Q10 sales may help the company beat expectations for its fiscal first quarter. Um said his channel checks in the U.S. reveal that the Q10 is off to a good start. “[There has been] Good Q10 customer interest and demand,” Um said. “The Q10’s launch has been much more successful than the Z10 launch, which is consistent with our view that the die-hard BlackBerry installed base of 76 million loyal to the keyboard presents a strong upgrade opportunity.”

Like his colleagues at Jefferies and Societe Generale, Um, too, sees the potential for first-quarter upside over consensus estimates, though he notes that the timing of the Q10’s launch — 14 countries in mid-May; U.S. in June — could limit it.

At $14.50, BlackBerry shares are trading up today.

Research outfit Raymond James says that the debut of BlackBerry’s new BlackBerry 10 operating system and the two handsets on which it runs have gone a long way toward repairing the home-turf market share erosion the company has suffered over the past few years. In the fourth quarter of 2012, BlackBerry’s share of the Canadian market topped out at a dismal 6 percent. But by the first quarter of 2013 it had more than doubled, rising to 13.5 percent.

The reason? The BlackBerry Z10, the company’s new all-touch handset — one that finally gave it table stakes at the smartphone game from which Google and Apple had ousted it. The Z10 had a strong Canadian launch, according to BlackBerry, which said the device’s debut was more than 50 percent better than any other launch day in its history in the country. Evidently the device has retained enough of that early momentum to drive continued market-share gains.

And now, with BlackBerry’s second BB10 handset — the Qwerty-keyboard Q10 — recently introduced in Canada, the country’s largest technology company may be poised to reclaim even more ground in its homeland.

“I think the Q10 will see much better demand than the Z10, as I have to believe the primary reason users are still on BlackBerry is for the physical keyboard,” Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt told AllThingsD. “That being said, a lot of that demand may get stretched out over a few quarters, as it will take time for enterprises to adopt BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, which is needed to support the Q10.”

Make no mistake, these days Canada is more an iPhone nation than anything else — Apple’s smartphone claimed 40.1 percent of the market in the first quarter of 2013. But that’s down from the 44 percent share it captured in the fourth quarter of 2012. If that trend continues, maybe BlackBerry can reclaim not only the market share it lost in the country, but its national pride, as well.

As Andrew MacLeod, BlackBerry’s managing director for Canada, told the Financial Post earlier this: “Canada is incredibly important to [us.] It is our home market, but it is also a very strategic market for us. We are very strong here, and I think we have a very unique relationship here with Canadians, that we treat with an endless amount of respect, attention and resources.”

According to new research from IDC, Microsoft’s mobile operating system accounted for 3.2 percent of global smartphone shipments in the first quarter. That’s a significant gain from the OS’s performance in the first quarter of 2012, which saw it capture a market share of 2 percent. And it was enough for Windows Phone to unseat BlackBerry from its third-place spot and claim the rank for its own.

Admittedly, ousting BlackBerry wasn’t exactly a difficult task. In the first quarter, the struggling handset maker saw its share of global smartphone shipments halved year over year. In Q1 of 2012, it claimed a 6.4 percent share. This year, BlackBerry managed to snag only 2.9 percent.

An unfortunate loss of momentum for BlackBerry, though one that’s not entirely attributable to the ascension of other platforms and a lack of interest in its own. BlackBerry is in the midst of a transition to an entirely new OS, BlackBerry 10. Right now, the company has just two smartphones that use it. The bulk of its handset portfolio continues to run on its older OS. And according to IDC analyst Kevin Restivo, that’s almost certainly having an effect on sales.

“Windows Phone is clearly gaining momentum,” Restivo told AllThingsD. “But BlackBerry’s decline this quarter really has more to do with the lag between sales of its old handsets and its new ones than anything else. Sure, Windows Phone is ahead now, but there’s no guarantee that it will maintain its third-place ranking in upcoming quarters.”

And, as I’ve noted before, third place in the current smartphone OS rankings doesn’t mean much. According to IDC, Google and Apple captured 92.3 percent of all smartphone shipments with their Android/iOS duopoly (Android: 59.1 percent; iOS: 23 percent). In other words, Windows Phone and BlackBerry are so far behind the two leading mobile platforms that their ranking is really just a moot point, anyway.

As a pioneering mobile device company, one would think that “mobile first” is a redundant call to arms for BlackBerry. And of course it is. By making that remark, Heins was offering a broader point about BlackBerry’s view of the mobile space. As he said later, “We believe in a single element of mobile computing: The one on your hip.”

It’s BlackBerry’s view that the smartphone is not simply a handset, but also a mobile computing engine that can drive the other devices we use during our daily lives — our entertainment systems, the tech in our cars and other connected peripherals. And it’s Heins’s opinion that there will soon be another disruption in mobile computing as the industry more broadly adopts that view.

“Mobile has become a fundamental part of our lives, and the next decade will see a major shift in how it impacts our lives,” Heins said. “It will be as monumental as the shift from wired to wireless.”

And BlackBerry is positioning itself to take advantage of it. Said Heins, “We will show the world that BlackBerry understands the mobile world better than anyone else.”

Big talk for a company still struggling to turn itself around. But that’s what these keynote events are all about — victory laps and optimism. And after a few years of floundering, BlackBerry does finally seem to be crystallizing its view of the space in which it competes and how best to succeed in it.

“Drilling down from desktop experiences and trying to fit them in the mobile space just doesn’t work,” Heins said. “People don’t want the desktop experience in a mobile device. Mobile devices need a mobile experience. Putting the desktop paradigm on them doesn’t work. Our only focus is mobile. We are the original mobile-first company.”

So that’s the big pitch. And now that Heins has made it, BlackBerry has to begin the difficult work of delivering on it. A daunting task when Apple and Google continue to so thoroughly dominate the mobile computing space. But BlackBerry has managed to hang on this long after the upheaval of 2012. Who’s to say it won’t scramble back.

“Some people told me last year that BlackBerry World would be the company’s last conference and my first and last time on the stage,” Heins said. “Well, I’m happy to say they were wrong. Not only are we still here, we are firing on all cylinders and we are definitely in the race.”

Designed for emerging markets, the Q5 is intended to flesh out the lower end of BlackBerry’s new handset portfolio. Details are slim, but the device seems to be the rumored R10 that has been stoking chatter on gadget sites for months now. The Q5 features a Qwerty keyboard and a 3.1-inch touchscreen. BlackBerry is offering it in four colors: Red, white, black and pink. The company expects to bring the Q5 to market sometime this summer; price has yet to be disclosed.

Also announced this morning: BlackBerry 10.1 for the BlackBerry Z10 — which will begin rolling out to U.S. carriers later this month — and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10.1.

Today, BlackBerry is in a far less precarious position. It has finally managed to ship BlackBerry 10 — along with a couple of handsets on which to run it — and all have been generally well received. The company’s touchscreen smartphone, the Z10, set launch-day sales records in Canada and the U.K.; its Qwerty sibling, the Q10, has been garnering positive reviews; takeover rumors have gone quiet; the company reported a surprise profit in its most recent quarter, and its shares are up some 25 percent since the beginning of the year. While BlackBerry hasn’t yet escaped the skepticism that mercilessly dogged it last year, it has provided investors and developers — and really anyone with an interest in the company — some reason for cautious optimism, despite the still daunting challenges ahead of it.

There’s a lot riding on BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins’s keynote address at BlackBerry Live tomorrow morning, but the company is in a far better place to deliver. So what can we expect from Heins when he takes the stage tomorrow?

• An update on BlackBerry 10 handset sales volume and momentum. Heins has previously said he expects to ship “tens of millions” of BlackBerry Q10 handsets. Is that still the goal? What are the company’s expectations for the Z10?
• Perhaps, the unveiling of BlackBerry 10.1 for the Z10, which brings a number of new features to the device, including the ability to install Skype.
• An update on developer support for BlackBerry 10, the current tally of apps in BlackBerry World, and perhaps the announcement of some new and much-needed marquee apps.
  As I’ve previously reported, Netflix and Instagram have both declined to build native apps for BlackBerry 10. BlackBerry has said it is committed to bringing both of them and other top titles to its new platform. Heins’s keynote would be an excellent time to announce a few victories.
• Further insight into BlackBerry’s view of the tablet market. Heins recently made headlines for some bearish remarks about the future of tablets, saying, “In five years, I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore.” If that’s the case, what is BlackBerry’s overall view of the future of mobile computing?
• An update of BlackBerry’s promised portfolio of BlackBerry 10 devices. What does the lineup look like beyond the Z10 and Q10? When will the rumored R10 ship? The company has already hit the market’s high end, presumably it plans to hit its middle and lower ends as well. What sort of device is it planning for emerging markets?

So, lots of issues to talk about, all of them speaking to a common theme. Now that Heins has seemingly succeeded in righting BlackBerry’s listing ship, where is it headed? And how is it going to get there?

Late Thursday, the U.S. Department of Defense granted security approvals to BlackBerry’s new BlackBerry 10 devices — the Z10 and Q10 — and to a version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 that’s outfitted with Knox, the company’s new security software.

Though DOD approval won’t result in immediate product orders for either company, it does clear the way for orders to be placed in the future. Good news, since the Pentagon currently has some 600,000 mobile device users. More important, however, are the implications of the agency’s endorsement.

Certification by the Pentagon is the gold standard in mobile device security. And it opens the door to all sorts of lucrative contracts from government customers and those from highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

So, truly a significant milestone for BlackBerry and Samsung, which, with Knox, has just fielded the very first approved-for-DOD-use Android-powered device. But not for Apple. It, too, is seeking security clearance for iOS 6. But the Pentagon has yet to grant it, though it is expected to later this month.

“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference, according to Bloomberg. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

They certainly haven’t been a good business model for BlackBerry. The company’s PlayBook tablet was unquestionably a failure, one that forced it to take a $485 million charge to write down unsold inventory in 2012. But for other companies — most notably Apple — the tablet market has been quite lucrative. In Apple’s last quarter, the company shipped 19.5 million iPads — 7.7 million more than it did the year prior.

So what’s Heins’s problem with tablets? There would seem to be two. The first: BlackBerry doesn’t have a good angle on the tablet business yet — something it needs to compete in a market where profits can be tight. The company is reevaluating its approach, because right now the tablet market is a lousy place for BlackBerry and pretty much any company not named Apple or Samsung.

The second: The mobile computing space is evolving very quickly, and Heins seems to have doubts about the viability of tablets going forward. Now, regardless of how much credence you lend that view, you’ve got to concede that five years is an awful long time in tech; few companies know that better than BlackBerry, which saw its early lead in smartphones whittled away in short order by Apple and Google. Who knows? Maybe some new technology will emerge in the next few years that will kick the legs out from under the tablet market. Sounds implausible now, but a few years back, the BlackBerry was widely known as the CrackBerry, and no one was using iPhones.

In any event, BlackBerry’s official position is not to read too, too much into Heins’s dismissal of the tablet market.

“The comments that Thorsten made yesterday are in line with previous comments he has made about the future of mobile computing overall, and the possibilities that come with a platform like BlackBerry 10,” BlackBerry spokesman Alex Kinsella told AllThingsD. “We continue to evaluate our tablet strategy, but we are not making any shifts in that strategy in the short term. When we do have information about our PlayBook strategy, we will share it.”

Three months after promising Skype for BlackBerry 10, BlackBerry says the Internet telephony service’s app is finally on its way to its next-generation operating system. The struggling smartphone maker said this week that Skype will be available for its new Q10 Qwerty handset on launch day. That’s May 1 in Canada, and sometime before the end of May in the U.S.

Note that Skype’s May debut is limited solely to the Q10. The full-touchscreen Z10, which preceded it to market, isn’t expected to offer Skype support until “a few weeks” after its launch on the Q10. Pressed for more specificity, BlackBerry would say only: “Skype for BlackBerry Z10 customers will be available when 10.1 is rolled out in the coming weeks.”

Is that “coming weeks,” as in less than a month? Or “coming weeks,” as in “as many as we need until we actually get the thing out the door?” Tough to say.

Anyway … Skype’s forthcoming debut on BB10 is good news for BlackBerry. Mobile platforms are only as strong as their app ecosystems. And support for top-tier apps like Skype are absolutely crucial to BlackBerry’s turnaround and continued relevance in the smartphone industry. The introduction could see some rough spots, though: In the course of reviewing the Q10, Katie Boehret ran into trouble when she tried the Skype app a couple of times, with her caller unable to see her video.

With the BlackBerry Z10 launched in a number of major markets and the QWERTY-keyboarded Q10 scheduled to follow it in April, BlackBerry will soon have its two marquee BB10 smartphones in wide release. What it won’t have, though, is a slick, new, affordably priced, entry-level handset for emerging markets.

That’s where BB7 comes in. BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins says the company plans to release a new handset running that legacy OS targeted at price-sensitive consumers in those markets. “We want to give them a good BlackBerry experience,” Heins told the Canadian Press. “So this is where probably another BlackBerry 7 product in that range makes a lot of sense.”

And indeed it does. BlackBerry has a lot of low-end loyalists in India, Indonesia and other emerging markets. It would be foolish to alienate them by forging ahead with only pricey new handsets running an unfamiliar OS. Better to offer them a BB7 smartphone that can serve as a transitional device until BB10 is more firmly established and keep them in the fold. In that scenario, the low-end BB7 phone serves as a placeholder for the low-end BB10 device that will someday replace it, and BlackBerry continues to hit that price-sensitive sweet spot where it has seen so much success in emerging markets.

“We’re not excluding those markets from BlackBerry 10 because of us wanting to sell BlackBerry 7,” said Heins. “You will see both in coexistence for awhile in those markets.”

As encouraging as the smartphone maker’s surprise fourth-quarter profit might be, it’s clear the company faces some still-formidable challenges — particularly in shoring up its eroding subscriber base.

BlackBerry lost another three million subscribers in its latest quarter, with its customer base falling to 76 million subscribers. Until the third quarter, BlackBerry had posted subscriber increases fairly consistently. So the fact that it just posted a second consecutive decline — and one that was larger than expected — is cause for concern indeed.

Returning BlackBerry to its former glory is already a daunting task; pulling that off while subscriber numbers are declining only makes it more so. Obviously, BlackBerry subscribers are the most likely buyers of the company’s new BlackBerry 10 handsets, so an accelerating decline in their membership is troubling.

“The subscriber decline is actually slightly worse than it seems since it includes BlackBerry 10 subs that do not generate service revenue,” Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt told AllThingsD. “BlackBerry is losing subscribers at a more rapid rate in emerging markets, which up until a year ago was still a source of rapid growth. That’s concerning as well.”

Morgan Stanley analyst Ehud Gelblum took a more pragmatic view of the decline, suggesting it was inevitable and, perhaps, not quite so worrisome.

“We’ve all known that sub number was going to start coming down,” Gelblum said. “The positive part that we only know now is that the subs they’re losing are mostly low-end prepaid subs who weren’t contributing much to the service revenue line and probably weren’t likely candidates to buy a Z10 in the first place.”

Appearing on CNBC on Thursday, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins downplayed recent declines in subscriber numbers, saying that services revenue per subscriber is the more important metric and the one that the company is striving to increase.

“The decline in the subscriber numbers is really associated [with] the former BlackBerry OS system, so we expect this to gradually continue with [a] single digit [drop], probably, in the next quarter,” Heins said. “What we’re really working on, and what we’re looking toward, is new services based on BlackBerry 10, and then we will be looking at the monetary value of those services, rather than pure subscriber numbers.”

In other words, this is all part of BlackBerry’s transition to its new platform.

A fair point, I suppose, though it would certainly be more reassuring if the number of departures weren’t quite so large. Down three million subs in a single quarter is sharp erosion and doesn’t bode well for a company that’s struggling to reverse its market-share loss. That’s a number that is very clearly going in the wrong direction, and BlackBerry really needs to execute in the next quarter to stanch the bleeding.

Posting Q4 financials before the bell on Thursday, BlackBerry reported earnings of 22 cents per share on revenue of $2.7 billion. The first number surpassed Wall Street estimates, the second did not. Analysts had expected BlackBerry to post a loss of 29 cents per share on revenue of $2.8 billion, according to consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters.

This is the second quarter in a row that BlackBerry has posted a profit after a string of dismal losses.

BlackBerry said it shipped six million smartphones during the quarter, including about one million BlackBerry 10 devices. So overall shipments were a bit lower than the 6.5 million analysts had been expecting, but the one million BB10 handsets were right on target. Less encouraging was the news that BlackBerry lost three million subscribers over the quarter. It began the quarter with 79 million and ended it with 76 million.

The company sold just 370,000 PlayBook tablets during the quarter. Clearly, amateur hour is not yet over.

BlackBerry ended the quarter with cash and equivalents of $2.9 billion. That was unchanged from the previous quarter. Good news, as the company plans to spend several hundreds of millions of dollars marketing its new BlackBerry 10 devices.

BlackBerry shares are up about 8 percent in pre-market trading.

As part of its earnings announcement, BlackBerry said that company co-founder Mike Lazaridis is retiring as director and vice chair of the board on May 1. “With the launch of BlackBerry 10, I believe I have fulfilled my commitment to the Board,” Lazaridis said. “Thorsten and his team did an excellent job in completing BlackBerry 10. We have a great deal of which to be proud. I believe I am leaving the company in good hands. I remain a huge fan of BlackBerry and, of course, wish the company and its people well.”

But, knowing that not all developers are ready to bet on a native app, the company has offered some shortcuts designed to get programs running on devices like its Z10, which went on sale this week at AT&T.

One of those is an emulation engine that allows Android apps to run. Roughly 20 percent of the 100,000 BlackBerry 10 apps fall into this category, according to Martyn Mallick, BlackBerry’s vice president for global alliances and business development.

“We give them a very nice on-ramp to get onto the platform,” Mallick said in an interview Tuesday. “Our users deserve to have great content. If that is the fastest way we can get some of that content, that’s great.”

Some of those developers whose initial plans were to simply port their Android app are now committing to a native app based on the strong early sales of BlackBerry 10 devices in other countries.

Still other developers, Mallick said, are sticking with their Android apps but adapting them to take advantage of BlackBerry 10-specific features, such as the BlackBerry Hub.

Mallick noted that Amazon added BlackBerry-specific features when it brought over the Android version of its Kindle app, while eBay is adding support for push notifications to the Android app it brought to BlackBerry 10.

Longer term, of course, Mallick wants companies to build native BlackBerry 10 applications.

Some big-name developers haven’t announced BlackBerry 10 apps at all, including Netflix and Instagram.

“There are still some partners that are not in a position where their schedules line up with our schedules,” Mallick said. “There are some partners where their priorities are elsewhere, not even necessarily in mobile.”

BlackBerry is trying a number of tactics to seduce app makers. The company has a $10,000 guarantee aimed at showing developers they can make money on BlackBerry.

The company has also promised that its first crop of devices (there are six models due out in the next 12 months) will all use one of two screen sizes, in an effort to prevent fragmentation.

“Overall we’re excited by what we are seeing in the marketplace,” Mallick said. “We have a high level of confidence we will continue to see more of the application partners come on board.”

As for the U.S. launch, Mallick said he isn’t putting too much stock in reports that the Z10 is getting a lukewarm response at AT&T. Wait until the phone launches at T-Mobile and Verizon, he said.

“Take a look over the next couple of weeks,” he said. “I expect we will see a stronger response.”

However, the Canadian company’s comeback effort will face a key test Friday when its first BlackBerry 10 device, the Z10, hits retail stores in the U.S.

“We are launching in the U.S. on the back of a successful launch in now more than 25 countries, and we expect the U.S. market to be no different,” BlackBerry Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben said in an interview on Thursday.

Launching in the U.S. took longer than other key markets due to regulatory requirements and carrier testing; however, that is often the case here, Boulben said. And, in the meantime, the number of apps available has grown to 100,000, up from the 70,000 that were ready when the Z10 was first announced on Jan. 30.

“We’ve strengthened our ecosystem,” Boulben said.

While the 100,000 number is impressive, it includes a mix of both native applications and Android apps that have been certified to run via an emulation engine. BlackBerry has not thus far said how many apps fall into each category.

Boulben said the company’s goal is to very quickly establish BlackBerry 10 as a strong third ecosystem in the U.S. market. He didn’t give a specific time frame but noted that, in terms of devices sold per month, BlackBerry could get to the third spot very quickly.

BlackBerry is planning its largest-ever marketing campaign for the new devices, a campaign that Boulben promised will be both visible and sustained as the company promotes BlackBerry as the best for those seeking to maximize productivity in their personal and professional lives.

The all-touch Z10 is the first in a line of about a half-dozen BlackBerry devices coming over the next 12 months, Boulben said. The keyboard-equipped Q10 should start shipping in the first countries in April but won’t hit the U.S. for some time.

In general, BlackBerry has said in any given country the launch of the Q10 will follow the Z10 by about eight weeks. That should be about the same in the U.S., Boulben said, but added that carriers will play a role.

“Obviously, we don’t control it fully,” he said.

Boulben wouldn’t comment on what devices will follow, but sources have told AllThingsD that Sprint plans to launch an all-touch BlackBerry 10 phone later this year that is something of a successor to the Z10.

Yep, that’s right. The same folks that torture-tained developers last year with that painful cover of REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You” are at it again.

This time, they’re throwing down a little ditty called “At Last.”

As with the last time, the band hits the notes, but it’s hard to seem cool with lyrics like “Your games and apps are in the storefront … A new platform built for you.”

There is some marketing in there, too, with the company noting that it has 70,000 apps for the BlackBerry 10 platform it introduced in January.

“To celebrate, we’re getting the (pretend) band back together, one more time. BlackBerry developers have been counting the days, and we received countless suggestions for the band’s final performance,” BlackBerry said in message accompanying the YouTube video. “So now, let the BlackBerry 10 journey begin … with one last little song.”

Without further ado, here’s the BlackBerry Band:

In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said that Apple’s iPhone is not the state-of-the-art smartphone it once was. In fact, it’s starting to look a little dusty.

“The rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly,” Heins said. “The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about, is now five years old.”

The rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly.

Well, as the CEO of BlackBerry, Heins should know, right? (Argh! The irony, it burns!) To be fair, Heins did acknowledge Apple’s mobile device innovations before dismissing the iPhone as outdated. “Apple did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market,” he said. “They did a fantastic job with the user interface, they are a design icon. There is a reason why they were so successful, and we actually have to admit this and respect that.”

At the time the announcement was made, speculation was that the “established partner” was most likely a carrier. And since it occured the same week that AT&T and Verizon both began taking preorders for the BlackBerry Z10, some assumed that one of them was responsible for that one-million-device order.

That’s an easy explanation. But it’s probably not an accurate one. And the reason is quite simple: Carriers like Verizon and AT&T are far too cautious to place an order of this size. Buy one million smartphones on a new, unproven platform? Up front? Unlikely.

Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair agrees: “We don’t believe any carriers would take that much risk out of the gate without some indications of demand.”

So, then, who’s the mystery partner? That’s still an open question, though Blair suggests that its most obvious answer is a big electronics distributor. “It would be easier for a distributor, particularly a global one, to commit to a million units over an extended period and across numerous devices,” he said.

It certainly would. Brightpoint, for example, is one of the largest of the large wireless device distributors. And it has a long-standing relationship with BlackBerry, distributing its handsets throughout the world — particularly in emerging markets like Malaysia. Could the “established partner” BlackBerry refers to be Brightpoint?

That’s a theory that makes a lot of sense, particularly given the lack of detail in BlackBerry’s spartan announcement. If the company had sold one million Z10s, you can be damn sure it would be crowing about it in the press. But it’s not. It’s talking up “BlackBerry 10 devices.” So the partner has likely purchased one million handsets across the BlackBerry 10 portfolio — the Z10, the Q10 and a handful of additional smartphones that the company has promised to deliver this year. And if that’s the case, then this is an order that may well be fulfilled over several quarters. Again, the utter absence of specificity in BlackBerry’s announcement offers nothing with which to rule out these possibilities.

In other words, what we may have here is a big headline that’s perhaps not quite as big as it has been made out to be. Which is not to say that it’s not great news for BlackBerry. A one-million-smartphone purchase is impressive — a feather in the company’s cap. But there’s a lot more work to be done here. BlackBerry’s comeback hinges not just on convincing existing customers to stick with its new platform, but on proving itself a viable alternative to the mobile customers who have jumped ship for iOS and Android devices.

Come June, BlackBerry will ship Secure Work Space for iOS and Android, a security solution that allows enterprise customers to separate and secure both work and personal data on employee smartphones. Similar to the company’s BlackBerry Balance technology, Secure Work Space essentially containerizes devices, securely separating work email and apps from personal ones. Not only does it remove the need for employees to carry individual devices for work and personal needs, it frees up companies from managing the virtual private networks needed to provide secure access to workers in the field. And it can all be managed through BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES).

That last bit may be the most important of all, because Secure Work Space will almost certainly make BES that much more appealing to the enterprise market that has long been BlackBerry’s stronghold. And, crucially, it allows the company to sell high-margin services to enterprise customers, even if some of their employees are using devices built on Android or iOS.

BlackBerry’s service revenue had been expected to drop this year. Perhaps, BES 10 and Secure Work Space can temper that decline.

Who is this mysterious “established partner,” and why is BlackBerry concealing its identity? The company refuses to say. “We are bound by confidentiality and cannot disclose our partner’s name,” BlackBerry spokesman Adam Emery told AllThingsD.

So, for the time being, the purchaser’s identity will remain unknown. But 1 million BlackBerrys is a hell of a big smartphone order. Military? Government? Some foreign entity? Or simply a carrier? I’m sure we’ll hear soon enough.

The No. 3 U.S. carrier plans to launch an all-touch BlackBerry-10-powered device in the second half of the year, according to a source familiar with the situation. The device is a follow-on handset to the Z10, rather than just a slightly modified version of the initial all-touch phone being sold by Sprint’s rivals.

While AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are all prepping their launch of the Z10, Sprint opted to launch only with the keyboard-equipped Q10.

That device is now expected to hit Sprint around midyear, with the new touch model slated for sometime in the second half of the year.

Officially, Sprint has confirmed only that it will carry the Q10, a move it announced back in January. The keyboard-equipped model is expected to hit some countries in April, but BlackBerry has acknowledged that it will take longer to reach the U.S.

Sources in position to know tell AllThingsD that AT&T will begin selling the Z10 the week of March 18. Bloomberg, in a report of its own, narrows that window further to Friday, March 22. Far from a surprise, really, as Verizon Wireless previously said it expected to add the Z10 to its portfolio by the end of March, as well. Price: Starting at $199.

While the Z10 has already debuted in a number of countries with some success, its U.S. launch will be among the most important. The country is among BlackBerry’s largest markets, and is crucial to its turnaround strategy. Hard to believe it now, but there was a time when BlackBerry was the leading smartphone brand in the U.S., thanks to its vast core demographic of enterprise users. The stateside debut of the Z10 will be the first volley in the company’s attempt to reclaim that title.

RIM

Not yet, anyway.

“You will not see us getting into the $50 or $60 phone segment,” BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said at the Communitech Tech Leadership Conference in Waterloo, Ontario, Thursday. “This is not BlackBerry. That segment will not serve our purpose.”

Which is not to say that BlackBerry doesn’t plan to build a BB10 device for more price-sensitive consumers — just that the Z10 is doing well enough in emerging markets, like India, that the company doesn’t yet feel compelled to roll out a cheaper, entry-level device. Better to sell the marquee device first, foremost and in volume than to spread yourself thin fleshing out the lower end of your portfolio too early.

Remember, BlackBerry 10 isn’t yet a well-established platform. It’s not the culmination of the company’s turnaround strategy, it’s the first move. And it’s perhaps the most important one of all: If successful, it will recast BlackBerry as a true rival to Apple and Google, not the also-ran that it’s in danger of becoming.

So, everything in its right time. BlackBerry’s road map includes less-expensive handsets, and the company will release them when it’s good and ready. Said Heins, “You will see new products being launched this year based on BlackBerry 10 that are more geared towards those lower price bands.”