BlackBerry-maker, Research in Motion (RIM) has criticized research firm, comScore alleging that the latest numbers released by the company on smartphone sales were wrong "by a wide margin".

ComScore released its latest figures about smartphone figures on in the UK on Friday. The research firm showed that BlackBerry had around 3.5 million subscribers in May in the UK. However, RIM claims the estimates were off by almost half and it has "just under 7 million subscribers" for the month.

ComScore data puts BlackBerry on the forth position in the UK behind the iPhone, handsets that run Android and Nokia, while Rim claims it is still the leading smartphone brand.

A spokeswoman for ComScore said there was a distinction between the numbers it had reported and those put out by BlackBerry. She pointed out that RIM shows sales figures while ComScore figures show ‘handsets used by people of over 13 years old’.

RIM responded by saying that "The amount of people with a second handset still doesn't begin to explain the difference in numbers." It put forward figures offered by rival GfK Group.