RESEARCH In Motion Ltd said yesterday it sold about 1 million phones running its new BlackBerry 10 system. It also surprised Wall Street by returning to profitability in the most recent quarter.

The earnings provide a first glimpse of how the BlackBerry 10 system, widely seen as crucial to the company's future, is selling internationally and in Canada since its debut on January 31. The 1 million new touch-screen BlackBerry Z10 phones were above the 915,000 that analysts had been expecting. Details on US sales are not part of the fiscal fourth quarter's financial results because the Z10 just became available there last week, after the quarter ended.

In another sign of uncertainty, RIM lost about 3 million subscribers to end the quarter with 76 million. It's the second consecutive quarterly decline for RIM, whose subscriber based peaked at 80 million last summer.

Bill Kreyer, a tech analyst for Edward Jones, called the decline "pretty alarming."

"This is going to take a couple of quarters to really see how they are doing," Kreyer said.

The BlackBerry, pioneered in 1999, had been the dominant smartphone for on-the-go businesspeople and other consumers before the iPhone debuted in 2007 and showed that phones can handle more than e-mail and calls.