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.”

Now there’s a basketball for that.

An Ohio-based company called InfoMotion has created a high-tech, Bluetooth-equipped basketball that senses the player’s motions with the ball and, after analyzing the data, shares it wirelessly to a compatible iOS or Android smartphone app.

InfoMotion has kicked off a Kickstarter campaign today to raise money for the production of the ball.

Mike Crowley, InfoMotion’s CEO, says the app doesn’t just spit out data; it’s supposed to offer advanced diagnostics to help players improve their games. “Five years ago, when we started the company, we knew consumers needed data. But the next evolution, beyond just activity tracking, is, how do I get better?”

The sensors in the ball can measure the direction of the ball’s spin and how quick your release is after catching the ball. In terms of ball handling, the Bluetooth ball knows the efficiency of your left hand versus your right hand, and how hard you dribble with each — in a sense, how confident you are with the ball.

Using this data, the app will recognize patterns and offer suggestions to shoot with a higher arc, or use your legs, or change the trajectory of the ball.

While the ball can sense when it has hit backboard, rim or net, InfoMotion’s “hit-or-miss” technology is still in development, so right now the app won’t tell you how many shots you’ve made — only how many you’ve taken.

The app also has a multiplayer mode, in which you and up to three other friends can take turns shooting 10 shots at a time and compete. InfoMotion’s goal is to create a kind of virtual playground, in which ballplayers around the world can compare scores within the app.

The sensor-laden basketball is made of indoor/outdoor synthetic leather, courtesy of Spalding. Despite the fact that the ball comes packed with an eight-hour battery, Crowley says it meets regulation weight and size. It’s Qi-compatible, so it can be charged wirelessly, and comes with a charging sleeve.

If you can already feel the synthetic leather pimples under your fingertips, here’s the part where you might get a little, um, deflated: InfoMotion doesn’t expect the ball to ship until the third quarter of this year. And it will retail for a whopping $295. That almost makes these basketball sneakers look reasonable (not really).

To be fair, this new offering is much cheaper than InfoMotion’s first high-tech basketball, which launched in 2011 and ranged in price from $2,500 to $5,000. That ball was aimed mainly at high-level coaches and players.

But $295 is still a lot for a synthetic-leather basketball. Here’s a little free advice, kids: High-tech or not, just get out there and shoot — a lot!

BlackBerry said on Wednesday that the Canadian and U.K. launches of the Z10 have been the best of any of its handsets debuts in those regions ever.

“In Canada, yesterday was the best day ever for the first day of a launch of a new BlackBerry smartphone. In fact, it was more than 50 percent better than any other launch day in our history in Canada,” BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said in a statement sent to AllThingsD. “In the U.K., we have seen close to three times our best performance ever for the first week of sales for a BlackBerry smartphone.”

The company declined to provide any hard sales numbers. And while we tried to dig up some old metrics from which to extrapolate, we have so far been unsuccessful. If those numbers exist somewhere outside of Waterloo, we haven’t been able to find them. In other words, early Z10 sales are much better than some numbers BlackBerry isn’t quantifying.

Still, BlackBerry’s announcement does lend further credence to preliminary reports of strong demand for the Z10 in the U.K. As we noted earlier this week, retail channel checks conducted following the device’s launch last week returned encouraging results, with some vendors reporting sell-outs, lines and other signs of strong demand.

Caveat: As I’ve noted before, strong early demand doesn’t always translate into solid sustainable demand. And it’s important to remember that Canada and the U.K. are two of BlackBerry’s largest markets, with a very loyal user base. Heavy buzz there doesn’t guarantee heavy buzz everywhere.

A frame from the BlackBerry Z10 Superbowl ad.

We are still in the very early days of Research In Motion’s attempted rebirth, so it’s impossible to make even a reasonably accurate call on its prospects. But some early sales data suggests that the company, which is rebranding itself BlackBerry after its best-known smartphone, may be seeing strong demand for the Z10, the first of two BlackBerry 10 handsets it will roll out in the coming months.

According to channel checks conducted by Jefferies & Co., preorders in the United Arab Emirates and Canada have so far been “solid.” More encouraging, though, are early reports from the U.K., where Z10 sales are evidently off to a good start. Jefferies analyst Peter Misek reports lines outside a number of U.K. retailers selling the device, and says that sell-outs of the white Z10 have been widespread. The black Z10 is easier to come by, but Misek says that with that device, too, stocks are limited.

“We believe Carphone Warehouse is seeing widespread sell-outs, while O2, Vodafone, Orange and EE are seeing robust demand,” Misek explained. “We estimate sell-in to be at least several hundred thousand units.”

If that estimate is correct, this is encouraging news indeed for the company. While the U.K. is among the biggest BlackBerry markets in the world — if not the biggest — it’s far, far smaller than the U.S., a crucial market for BlackBerry.

If Z10 sees demand similar to that of the U.K. when it debuts in the U.S. in March, BlackBerry may have a chance to regain some of the traction it has spent the past five years losing. “To put [these early Z10 numbers] in perspective, the iPhone had first weekend sales of 5 million plus in the U.S.,” Misek said. “The U.S. is five times larger so continued strong sales could bode very well for Blackberry.”

Reach for comment on early U.K. demand for the Z10, BlackBerry spokeswoman Amy Jones said the company was encouraged by early demand.

“We have supplied initial shipments to our partners and carriers in Canada, the UK and the UAE (which is due to launch February 10th),” Jones said. “We are very pleased that our partners are able to start selling the BlackBerry Z10 so quickly following our global launch event. We are extremely encouraged that the initial demand for the BlackBerry Z10 has been high.”

Happy Super Bowl weekend! In case you missed them and are bored waiting for the kickoff, here are the top 10 stories on AllThingsD from the week of 1/28:

1.) Twitter Hacked; 250,000 User Accounts Potentially Compromised

2.) BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

3.) HBO Go Is Coming to Apple TV. Why Isn’t Everything Coming to Apple TV?

4.) PSA: Unlocking Phones Without Carrier Permission Becomes Illegal on Saturday

5.) Time Inc. Braces for Layoffs This Week [Update: They happened -- here's the memo too]

6.) Twitter’s Vine App Doesn’t Have a Porn Problem. It Has a Porn Discovery Problem.

7.) iPhone Users Rack Up the Highest Carrier Bills

8.) Sales Talks Fell Through, So Ad Exchange AdBrite Shuts Down

9.) The Next Step for Computing: The Storage Fabric

10.) Apple Announces iPad Maxi

On Thursday, shares of the smartphone pioneer continued the downward slide they began the day before, during the unveiling of its long-awaited BlackBerry 10 OS and handsets. BlackBerry shares opened down 10 percent and, at $13.21, they’re down nearly 4 percent as I write this.

Why the pessimism after what seemed to be a fairly successful launch event? The estimated arrival dates of the first of BlackBerry’s BB10 phones. Though the touchscreen Z10 debuted in the U.K. and will ship in Canada and the United Arab Emirates next week, it won’t hit the U.S. market until March. And the Q10, a BB10 handset with a physical keyboard, won’t be available anywhere until April. Later-than-expected ship dates imply smaller-than-hoped-for unit shipments, and the Street clearly finds that disappointing.

Beyond that, there are concerns about the BlackBerry ecosystem and addressable market that I mentioned earlier this morning. That said, BB10 is a vast improvement over its predecessor, and has certainly closed the gap with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. It’s not hard to imagine it appealing to BlackBerry diehards looking for a next-generation device. But the legacy user base is an easy mark. Those BlackBerry users who have defected to iOS and Android over the last few years will be a far harder sell.

Certainly Wall Street wasn’t impressed. BlackBerry’s shares, which had more than doubled over the past three months after a precipitous decline, tanked following the event. Shares closed down 12 percent at $13.78. Profit-taking? Surely there was some of that. But investor anxiety over the daunting task ahead of the company was obviously at work here as well. As BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins himself said, “Today is not the finish line. It’s the starting line.”

And the race ahead is one in which BlackBerry has already been lapped by Google and Apple, the two smartphone upstarts that unseated it. Which is not to say it’s a race in which the company is ill-equipped to compete. BlackBerry’s new Z10 handset appears to be garnering generally positive reviews. BlackBerry 10 seems to have finally closed the gap with more mobile operating systems. And while BlackBerry currently holds just 4.6 percent of the smartphone market — a tenth of what it once claimed — it has a user base of about 79 million people with a predisposition for its handsets. And there is almost certainly pent-up demand for its new hardware among diehard BlackBerry users.

But is there untapped demand beyond that?

Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? With its new BlackBerry 10 OS and handsets, does BlackBerry have what it needs to convert iPhone and Android users who no longer consider its offerings an option? Because once the BlackBerry faithful upgrade their devices, there’s a real risk that sales could slow. BB10’s task is really threefold: It needs to satisfy hardcore BlackBerry users, stem defections to rival platforms and encourage defections to its own platform, and convince developers to build apps for it. That’s not going to be easy when it’s not at all clear that the world wants or needs another mobile operating system.

“BlackBerry 10 is competent,” Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair told AllThingsD. “But it’s three years too late to catch anyone’s attention.”

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu took a similar view, noting some recent carnage in the smartphone market. “So far, customers and developers have been lukewarm to adopt new platforms, including Windows 8 and webOS, despite strong reviews and carrier interest,” Wu said. “To us, it’s not just the number of apps, but the quality of apps and whether developers are making money and customers are using them.”

Precisely.

Debuting BB10 with 70,000 apps is impressive, and BlackBerry deserves a lot of credit for pulling that off. But a critical mass of apps is hardly a self-sustaining app ecosystem. A healthy app ecosystem is a transactional one. That’s why you often hear Apple boast about the billions of dollars it has paid out to developers. Sure, the iTunes App Store is approaching 800,000 apps. But that’s an empty number. The important thing is that people are buying so many of them that, as of last October, Apple had paid developers $6.5 billion.

BlackBerry is a long way from reaching either of those heady numbers. But 70,000 apps is a start. And BB10 and the Z10 handset would seem to have at least given the company table stakes in the smartphone high-rollers room. Now, can BlackBerry parlay those stakes into a true comeback? (And if not, can it parlay them into an acquisition? BB10 potentially makes it a more attractive target.)

Who knows? Perhaps the consumer smartphone market is ready for something new.

We’ll see.

RELATED POSTS:

• BlackBerry CEO: PlayBook Update Coming, Vague on Future Tablet Plans
• Most — But Maybe Not All — U.S. Carriers Will Have BlackBerry 10 Device by March
• BlackBerry 10 Boasts Some Key Apps, but Many Big Names Missing
• BlackBerry to Launch in U.S. in Mid-March
• RIM Changes Name to BlackBerry
• RIM Aims for Reinvention With BlackBerry 10 Launch
• Walt Mossberg: BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

However, when it comes to future tablets, Heins said the company is trying to figure out a way to combine software and services, since selling tablet hardware alone is a tough way to make money at the moment.

“We are looking for specific value-added services on top of the tablet,” Heins said.

His comments came in a question-and-answer session following the announcement of the first two BlackBerry 10 phones in New York.

He also addressed a few other questions, including the expected April arrival of the second BlackBerry 10 phone, the physical-keyboard-packing Q10.

As for battery life, the Z10 should get users through the day, Heins said, adding that the battery is removable for power users who want to carry a second.

Asked how he would measure success, Heins said that the company had specific sales targets, but he didn’t share those. Instead, he handed it off to marketing chief Frank Boulben, who said the goal is for early users to be very happy, and that, beyond that, the company hopes to quickly become the No. 3 player in smartphones.

RELATED POSTS:

• BlackBerry CEO: PlayBook Update Coming, Vague on Future Tablet Plans
• Most — But Maybe Not All — U.S. Carriers Will Have BlackBerry 10 Device by March
• BlackBerry 10 Boasts Some Key Apps, but Many Big Names Missing
• BlackBerry to Launch in U.S. in Mid-March
• RIM Changes Name to BlackBerry
• RIM Aims for Reinvention With BlackBerry 10 Launch
• Walt Mossberg: BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

And the news was not exactly promising, especially for those in the United States. First came word via The Wall Street Journal that it would be March before the first customers in the U.S. could buy a device.

Onstage, things actually got a bit worse, as Heins said “most” of the big four U.S. carriers would have it by March. Verizon announced that it would carry both the touchscreen Z10 and keyboard-equipped Q10 handhelds, but did not give availability.

The Z10 will cost $199.99 with a two-year contract. Pricing for the Q10 was not revealed at this time. Both devices will support the carrier’s 4G LTE network, and will come in black or white. The white Z10 will be an exclusive to Verizon Wireless.

AT&T is also set to offer both smartphones, but no word on pricing or release date. T-Mobile has a landing page up for the Z10, and it’s worth noting that it looks like the handset will support its upcoming 4G LTE network.

Sprint also said it would carry a device “later this year,” but it is carrying the keyboard-equipped Q10, which is expected to arrive later than the Z10.

Heins said the company’s main priority is getting the Z10 out the door. As for the keyboard-equipped Q10, “I think we will expect to see it in the April timeframe,” he said.

The device is going on sale in Canada and some other countries as soon as next week.

Speaking with reporters, Heins said Wednesday that a longer testing period at U.S. carriers is why it will take longer to hit the market here.

“The reason is that the testing process in the U.S. with those carrier partners is a rather lengthy one,” Heins said.

The BlackBerry Z10 features a 4.2-inch touchscreen displaying 356 pixels per inch. It has an eight-megapixel camera on back, and only comes in a 16 gigabyte model, though there is a memory-expansion slot. Meanwhile, the BlackBerry Q10 features a full physical keyboard with a 3.1-inch, 720 by 720-pixel touch display.

In his review of the BlackBerry Z10, AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg found the hardware decent and the user interface easy to use, but said that it will need to continue to add more apps if it’s going to succeed.

The BlackBerry 10 event is still taking place. Click here for our live coverage.

RELATED POSTS:

• BlackBerry CEO: PlayBook Update Coming, Vague on Future Tablet Plans
• Most — But Maybe Not All — U.S. Carriers Will Have BlackBerry 10 Device by March
• BlackBerry 10 Boasts Some Key Apps, but Many Big Names Missing
• BlackBerry to Launch in U.S. in Mid-March
• RIM Changes Name to BlackBerry
• RIM Aims for Reinvention With BlackBerry 10 Launch
• Walt Mossberg: BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

But what about apps?

For starters, a few key apps were already known, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Several more were announced or shown onstage during the event: Skype, Amazon Kindle, WhatsApp, Angry Birds, Where’s My Water?, Where’s My Perry?, Box, MLB.com, Rdio, Songza, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, to name a few.

RIM — pardon me, BlackBerry — also showed how video chatting and screen sharing are now integrated into the popular BlackBerry Messenger application, as well as built-in photo-editing and music-video-making apps.

But right now it’s still unclear when apps like Instagram, Spotify and Pandora, or streaming video apps like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube, will make their way onto BlackBerry 10. And notably absent was Google Maps.

Update: A spokesman for BlackBerry says the company is “in talks” with Instagram and Netflix, but could not confirm when those apps will make their way into the store. Also, there is not a dedicated YouTube app, as we suspected, but he was quick to point out that YouTube can be watched on a mobile browser.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins has been quoted as saying that the company’s app store, still called BlackBerry World, would have more than 70,000 apps at the time of this launch. BlackBerry’s Martyn Mallick reaffirmed during today’s event that this is the case.

Just a couple weeks ago, RIM hosted a “Portathon,” enticing developers to create submissions for 15,000 new apps in a single weekend, as AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski reported.

To hear BlackBerry talk about it, developers are excited to take advantage of some of the new features that BlackBerry 10 offers, like “BlackBerry Flow,” or real-time multitasking between apps.

But keep in mind the competition. Apple currently has 800,000 apps in its App Store, with 300,000 optimized for iPad. The total number of apps in Google’s app store, Google Play, isn’t totally clear, but, by some estimates, Google is nipping at Apple’s heels.

Let’s not even get into apps for the Microsoft Windows Phone operating system. Okay, to be fair, let’s talk about it: Microsoft said in a recent blog post that it had “more than doubled” its Windows Phone app library with the addition of 75,000 new apps in 2012. Which means even Windows Phone boasts more apps than BlackBerry 10.

Of course, some will argue that it really doesn’t matter how many apps are available — it’s whether the important ones are there. Many smartphone owners download a bunch of apps, only to have them sit there taking up space on their phones.

Are BlackBerry’s apps enough to sway current iPhone and Android users?

The BlackBerry 10 event is still taking place. Click here for our live coverage.

RELATED POSTS:

• BlackBerry CEO: PlayBook Update Coming, Vague on Future Tablet Plans
• Most — But Maybe Not All — U.S. Carriers Will Have BlackBerry 10 Device by March
• BlackBerry 10 Boasts Some Key Apps, but Many Big Names Missing
• BlackBerry to Launch in U.S. in Mid-March
• RIM Changes Name to BlackBerry
• RIM Aims for Reinvention With BlackBerry 10 Launch
• Walt Mossberg: BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones