RIM talked up the success of its BlackBerry app efforts, as part of a business update which highlighted weaknesses elsewhere in its business.

The company said that its portfolio now features more than 80,000 apps, which represents a 220 percent increase year-on-year. This includes availability of 15,000 apps for the PlayBook tablet, compared to less than 2,000 last year.

With the PlayBook powered by a platform that has significant commonalities with the company’s next generation smartphone OS, it said that “we believe this bodes well for our ecosystem as we get set to launch BlackBerry 10.”

It also said that at its recent BlackBerry World conference and BlackBerry 10 Jam events, “more than 5,000 developers, partners, carriers and enterprise customers from 115 different countries saw the first glimpses of our next-generation BlackBerry 10 platform and their response was encouraging.”

Following the distribution of a prototype BlackBerry 10 device to developers, tagged Dev Alpha, RIM said that “many are well underway in developing applications to be ready for the launch of BlackBerry 10 in the latter part of calendar 2012.”

Away from its developer efforts, RIM warned that it is facing an operating loss for the quarter to 2 June 2012, with “lower volumes and highly competitive pricing dynamics in the marketplace” impacting its performance.