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RIM's Blackberry smartphones are no longer the default choice for corporate employees, a pair of stories released today seem to imply. Computer manufacturer Dell is planning to move its 25,000 employees from RIM smartphones to its own Dell Venue Pro - a phone running the new Windows Phone 7 operating system. Later, the company will permit Android phones as an alternative.

And Dell isn't the only RIM-switcher making headlines today, either. Two of the biggest U.S. banks, Bank of America and Citigroup, are seriously considering the iPhone, it's being reported.

According to a new report from International Data Corporation (IDC), Apple has just passed RIM, makers of the Blackberry smartphone, to become the fourth largest mobile vendor in the world.

Prior to this quarter (Q3 2010), RIM held the number four spot. It's now at number five. Apple's move up the charts also ousted Sony Ericsson, which has now exited the top five altogether.

Last week, RIM updated its Blackberry App World storefront to version 2.0, an important update for consumers and developers alike. For end users, the "My World" view within the updated store has been streamlined to show installed apps, pending apps, archived apps and deleted ones. There are also new ways to discover apps, like the "top 25" lists, which highlight the best apps in a number of categories.

But what developers will really want to know about are the new billing and distribution options App World 2.0 introduces.

There's something about paying bills - the checkbook, the stamps, the envelopes, the taste of the adhesive - that just rubs me the wrong way. It isn't even the money making a one-way march out of my account, that's just inevitable. If I never had to deal with a paper bill again, my life would be happier.

My world may have just gotten a little rosier, as one company has just released a tool to make paying those paper bills possible by iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

There are some 225,000 mobile applications for the iPhone now and 70,000 for Android, so every so often we like to highlight a few that have caught our attention. This latest edition of our favorite smartphone apps includes a few in testing, a few we're madly in love with, some notable updates and some you may not have even heard of yet.

The smartphone battle, as everyone knows, is raging these days. Analysts have been making predications about which mobile operating system platform will end up on top and Nielsen has been tracking market share trends. But what do venture capitalists think about all this? A recent post on Thomson Reuters's peHUB offers a few key insights.

Not long ago, video conferencing was science fiction - now it's a key part of many enterprises' communication strategy. According to a survey conducted by LifeSize, 51% of mid-sized enterprises polled use video conferencing and the majority of those that don't are planning to. And it's getting cheaper, easier and more ubiquitous. Several pieces of news in the past couple weeks are illuminating some key trends in enterprise video conferencing. Here's what we're seeing.

Imagine taking a picture using your smartphone and immediately having all of your Facebook friends automatically tagged, without even visiting the website, the app, or looking at the picture itself. This is the future that Viewdle plans to make a reality.

We spoke with Jason Mitura, the chief product officer for Viewdle, and he told us that the company would offer a real change in facial recognition technology by taking the process out of the cloud and into the device itself.

Mobile analytics firm Distimo has released its September report detailing the most popular mobile applications of Q3 2010. The report covers the top apps, both free and paid, for the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Nokia (Ovi), Palm's webOS and Windows Phone platforms.

Below are the findings.

Today Nokia has released its Ovi Store download numbers and they're starting to look good. In fact, it appears that Nokia users are now downloading more applications than Blackberry users.

According a press release put out this morning, Nokia says it now reaches 140 million customers worldwide and is seeing more than 200,000 people per day signing up for Ovi, the marketplace which features applications, music, video and other downloads. Also, the Ovi Store, available in 190 countries, has now reached a milestone of 2.3 million downloads per day.