RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) is taking a beating at the moment from handset makers like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Samsung, which have eaten into a smartphone market share that it took years for the BlackBerry maker to build on both sides of the Atlantic. RIM, however, claims that it is still the company to beat in one of its key markets, the UK—although its lead is narrowing.

Looks like new CEO Scott Thompson is wasting little time starting to get Yahoo’s house in order: just a few weeks into the new CEO’s tenure, the internet company is pulling support for 10 of its less-popular mobile apps.

“For a quarter of a century, Washington and Wall Street have wanted China to become an integral part of the world economy. Their wish has been granted, and now it’s time to come to grips with the implications.”—Jeffrey Garten, Yale, June 2002 (BusinessWeek)

Ten years after those words were written we still find ourselves wringing our hands over how much American prosperity is derived from Chinese manufacturing. A series of articles from The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) this week on Apple’s tricky relationship with the company that builds the iPhone and iPad makes it clear that while society may occasionally recoil at the human cost required to build our flashy mobile toys, when it comes to consumer electronics there is no Plan B.

The long-awaited Facebook IPO might arrive as soon as next week, according to a new report. When the company does get around to filing the paperwork it will set Facebook on the path toward one of the richest IPOs in tech history.

It looks like the death spiral that was the Bitbop mobile video service is finally no longer. PaidContent understands that the service—once built and owned by News Corporation (NSDQ: NWS) and sold, along with the rest of Fox Mobile, to IT services company Jesta when News Corp. couldn’t make a business out of it—is today laying off most of the staff that worked on Bitbop and shutting down the service.

Jon Rubinstein, the former Palm CEO who revived the company under WebOS but was never able to produce a breakthrough product after HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm, is leaving HP (NYSE: HPQ). His departure is not exactly a surprise, coming six months after he was reassigned just before HP began to wind down its mobile strategy.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is a massive player in the digital advertising world, but given that this remains only a part of the overall ad market, the Internet giant will not soon pose a real threat to big ad agencies of the world like WPP, Interpublic and Omnicom, according to a report out today from Pivotal Research Group.

Audiobooks.com, a cloud-based streaming audio service for iOS and Android, launches this week as a would-be competitor to the Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) owned-Audible.com. Considering how many people listen to audiobooks while they are in transit, though, is a streaming service actually a workable solution?

The social network Twitter is facing a storm of criticism from users, after revealing that it has implemented a system that would let it withhold particular tweets from specific countries.

With most of the major handset makers having reported earnings for the quarter that ended in December, analyst houses are laying out their rankings in global smartphone and overall mobile shipments. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has just about managed to keep its top position overall, while Apple’s phenomenal quarter has put it into pole position among smartphone makers—but only by a fraction of a percentage point.

Samsung may be king of the Android smartphone world, but it’s playing hard to get. The company declined to release smartphone sales figures late Thursday in reporting record earnings, but it is clearly faring better than some Android competitors against Apple’s iPhone juggernaut.

Early last week, a six-month promotion period, during which U.S. users were exempted from Spotify’s five-plays-per-song, 10-hours-per-month limits, was due to end for the first of the service’s American adopters, if reports were to be believed. But that apparently hasn’t yet happened.

Having already warned investors that its fourth quarter was going to be rough, Motorola (NYSE: MMI) didn’t disappoint when the actual numbers arrived Thursday. Smartphone shipments were up slightly but the company continues to lose money on mobile sales while everyone waits for a ruling on the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) deal.

		EPS*	Rev. vs Q410	Net Inc. vs Q410
Motorola	Release		Flat	200%

* vs. Analysts' Estimates: Beat Met Missed