After two quarters of meager profits, BlackBerry has posted its Q1 2014 results (for the three-month period ending June 1st 2013), revealing an $84 million loss from $3.1 billion revenue. Compared to last quarter, when the Canadian manufacturer made $94 million profit from $2.7 billion, the revenue results are fairly positive, although Wall Street hoped to see $3.3 billion. The company also ended the quarter with $3.1 billion in cash — its best position in three years.

With smartphone shipments, BlackBerry's position strengthened for the first time in a while. After five consecutive quarters of falling shipments, this quarter saw a rise from 6 million to 6.8 million sold worldwide. It's not clear how many were BlackBerry 10 devices, but the fact that the company has neglected to give us exact figures this time doesn't bode well. Last quarter, the company explained that around 17 percent of the smartphones it shipped were running BlackBerry 10.

The company also didn't update investors on its subscriber base — a figure that represents the total number of BlackBerrys in use. It has consistently released this sort of information along with its financial results in the past, but he hope to find out more specifics on performance in an investor call later, and will update this article with any additional information (see update below).

BlackBerry has pinned its hopes on the success of its new operating system, and this is the first full quarter of sales since its all-touch Z10 smartphone was released. It's worth noting that, although it has been on sale in Europe and elsewhere for some time, the much-anticipated Q10 QWERTY smartphone was launched in the US after this financial period ended. The company's stock was currently down 23 percent in pre-market trading.

Update: BlackBerry has just revealed a drop of four million subscribers over the quarter. The total subscriber count now stands at 72 million, down from 76 million in Q4 2013, and 79 million in Q3 2013. It also announced that its PlayBook tablet will not be updated to BlackBerry 10. The company refused to discuss quarterly sales of BlackBerry 10 smartphones or the split of BlackBerry 7 / 10 devices sold, but revealed it had shipped 2.7 million BlackBerry 10 devices in total, giving BB10 a maximum 40 percent share of total BlackBerry smartphone sales. It's more likely that the actual sold-through figure was significantly lower, however.