Perhaps reports of the imminent demise of the Canadian pioneer in the smartphone technology were a bit premature. “BlackBerry still has pulse”, said analysts after it turned out that BB’s manufacturer, Research in Motion, showed better–than-expected (though still rather dismal) fiscal results at the beginning of September 2012.

We won’t bore you with the company’s latest performance figures. Anyway, it’s enough to take a look at BlackBerry sales in the bidorbuy Recent Buys section to realise that there is indeed still life in the old BB. Last week (just like the week before, and the week before…), BlackBerry was indisputably the most sought-after smartphone, with more than two hundred sales. All others (iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, etc.) lagged far behind. BlackBerry is also consistently among the most popular search terms on bidorbuy.

After all, BlackBerry has 80 million subscribers worldwide…

And the good times might be ahead.

In the first quarter of 2013 RIM will launch its BlackBerry 10 operating system. The expectations are high: the new OS should make BlackBerry a worthy challenger of iPhone and Android devices. To that end, RIM has adopted a new developer programme, with freely available development tools and device simulators. Android developers are encouraged to port their apps to the new BlackBerry OS. This is to help BB catch up on the applications explosion, for it is by the apps that a mobile device lives or dies.

Ahead of the OS 10 launch, RIM is planning to aggressively drive sales of devices with the older platform, which means that you will be able to lay your hands on a BlackBerry running on OS 7 at a lower price.

So, the next few months promise to be exciting for the “BBM me” crowd!

A peek into the future: BlackBerry 10. The “soft keyboard” with auto-prediction and auto-correction; user is able to smoothly navigate between applications.