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RIM's BlackBerry App World hits 3B download mark

The handset maker says its app store racked up the most recent 1 billion downloads in the last six months.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Research In Motion finally has some good numbers to offset its recent wave of bad ones.

The handset maker announced Friday that its BlackBerry App World had reached the 3 billion download mark -- a billion of those in just the last six months. To reach that number, customers were downloading app at the rate of about 2.5 million per day from the collection of 90,000 apps.

As impressive as that sounds, those numbers pale in comparison with Apple's App Store, which announced in March that it had served up 25 billion downloads from its 650,000 apps, and Google's Play store, which announced last month it had delivered 20 billion downloads from 600,000 apps.

The BlackBerry maker reported a first-quarter loss last month of $518 million, or 99 cents a share, on revenue of $2.8 billion, down 33 percent from $4.2 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Adjusted loss, which excludes goodwill charges, was $192 million, or 37 cents a share. Wall Street had been expecting a loss of 4 cents a share on revenue of $3.07 billion.