It's been a few weeks since RIM had a spot of real good news. In the wake of the iPhone, the Palm Pre, and the bevy of new Android releases it's been easy to forget about the BlackBerry Tour. Thankfully for RIM, their customers didn't. The new smartphone launched this weekend and sold between 275,000 and 300,000 units in its first 24 hours.

As a general rule, a mobile phone needs to sell around 100,000 units in order to be considered successful. By that metric, the BlackBerry Tour is already doing spectacularly. Terrible app store aside, RIM knows how to make smartphones that people love. The Tour isn't a ground-breaking device, but it'll keep the money flowing while RIM builds something that is.

I'm interested to see whether or not BlackBerry acquiesces to Verizon's demands that they remove their 'App World' from Verizon smartphones in favor of Verizon's own app store. RIM's decision to launch the MyBlackBerry social community was due in large part to a desire to improve their app store through user feedback. If this is something RIM considers important, I doubt they'll be willing to kill a huge potential sector of their app market.