RIM announced results for the quarter to 27 August 2011 which again failed to impress, with Bloomberg stating that the BlackBerry vendor had “disappointed investors for the third consecutive quarter.”

The company announced net income of US$329 million for the quarter, down from US$797 million year-on-year, on revenue of US$4.17 billion, down from US$4.62 billion.

During the quarter, the company shipped around 10.6 million BlackBerry smartphones, which Jim Balsillie (pictured), co-CEO of RIM, said was “slightly below our forecast,” due to lower than anticipated demand for older models. Shipments of the company’s new BlackBerry 7-powered smartphones were said to be “near the high end of our expectations,” but these devices were only launched into the channel three weeks before the end of the period.

Less impressively, the company said that it had shipped around 200,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. In its conference call, Balsillie said that RIM  is planning a “major software upgrade” for the device, which will “deliver some highly anticipated new capabilities and applications, which we expect to reinvigorate sales” – including the much missed native email support.

Also promised are a number of programmes designed to improve sell-through of the PlayBook in both enterprise and consumer channels.

Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM, said that development of devices powered by RIM’s next-generation QNX platform is going “extremely well,” and that at launch, products will have the “features, industrial design and content and app ecosystem it needs to deliver a dynamic and industry leading customer experience.” According to reports, the company is looking to speed these products to market, in order to reinvigorate the BlackBerry product line.

On a more positive note, the company said that its service revenue passed US$1 billion for the first time. The BlackBerry subscriber base grew by 40 percent year-on-year, to pass 70 million.

Looking forward, RIM said that revenue for the third quarter (to 26 November) is expected to be in the US$5.3 billion–US$5.6 billion range, with shipments of between 13.5 million–14.5 million. This represents a forecasted BlackBerry shipment growth of 27 percent–37 percent quarter-on-quarter.

The company also invested approximately US$780 million through its membership of the bidding consortium which won the auction to acquire the patent portfolio of Nortel Networks. Due to this transaction, it shelved its share repurchase programme during the period – it said that this will be “commenced at our discretion.”

RIM recorded a US$118 million charge resulting from its previously-announced restructure.