Traditionally Blackberrys - the corporate appendage du jour - have been black. Apart from a brief moment when they were blue.

So it’s perhaps significant, then, that when Mike Lazaridis, the co-chief executive of RIM, which makes them, arrives to discuss the company’s shift into a more consumer-friendly line of products, a sleek, white model - not yet released in the UK - is pushed across the table.

Does this new offering not bear just the tiniest resemblance to an iPod?

“It isn’t white!” Lazaridis intones, cradling the newer, ‘softer’ version of the company’s Pearl handset. “It’s mother-of-pearl.”

But the “Apple question” - and in particular whether Steve Jobs’s much-feted new iPhone, which ships in June, represents a threat to Blackberry’s dominance in the mobile e-mail market - still hangs.

“People ask me this, and I say: what penetration does Apple have in business? The answer is vanishingly small.”

“They say: ‘The iPhone’s going to have mobile e-mail.’ I say: Well, what platform are they going to use to send business e-mail? Yahoo!?”

Lazaridis goes on: “Hats off to Steve - he’s brought ‘cool’ to smart phones and it’s going to help the whole industry. But Blackberry isn’t reacting to iPhone. If anything, iPhone is a reaction to the industry, which is increasingly converging the applications in products. It’s not that hard to put an MP3 player in a phone.”

Mr Lazaridis is in ebullient mood.

Sales of RIM’s iconic device - reportedly so addictive that it has been nicknamed the ‘crackberry’ - are expected to grow from 875,000 to just shy of 1 million in the current quarter, which ended last week.

Blackberry’s share of the global PDA market - 19.8 per cent - still dwarfs that of its competitors, and profits rose by 46 per cent in the most recent quarter - up to $176 million from $120.1 in the same period a year ago.

Even the possibility that it may restate more than $45 million in earnings dating back to 1997 as a result of an internal investigation into its stock option granting practices has failed to dent investor confidence.

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