Despite protestations from its citizens and dire warnings from RIM, Saudi Arabia held fast to its stance that RIM should shut off Blackberry data services in the country today. The handset manufacturer complied around 4AM this morning.

Approximately 700,000 Saudis use (well, formerly used) Blackberry services on a day-to-day basis. The big stink around the situation is that RIM was unwilling to host a data center in Saudi Arabia, instead sending data out to its Canadian servers. Other countries take issue with it as well. Over the coming months, the UAE will definitely be shutting down services and India and Lebanon have talked about doing the same.

If RIM didn’t comply, the company would have been fined $1.3 million.

For a while there it seemed as if every analyst was ready to sell RIM up the river. The company wasn’t performing well outside the enterprise market according to most, and the iPhone and Android were gaining speed at alarming rates. Not much has changed. The iPhone has slowed a bit and Android continues to skyrocket, but according to the latest RIM numbers, the BlackBerry brand is doing surprisingly well.

The company missed its quarterly earnings mark, but not by much. Activations are at an all-time high with 4.9 million this quarter. Annual revenue is up a whopping 35 percent. CEO Jim Balsillie sounded positive and said the company is, “off to a great start in fiscal 2011 and expect strong shipments, revenue, subscriber and earnings growth in Q1.”

Shares were still down for the day, likely because of the missed earnings numbers, but all in all things don’t seem so dire. In fact, it all sounds pretty good.