UPDATED: RIM just let me know that Facebook for BlackBerry 1.6 will be released at 6 PM Pacific, not Eastern, as I was originally informed.

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I just got word from Research In Motion (RIM) that the latest version of the company’s Facebook for Blackberry application will be released at 6 PM PST this evening. The social networking app, which is easily one of RIM’s most popular—it’s a mainstay on the BlackBerry App World Top Downloads page—was expected to be upgraded on May 28, and though that day came and went without a peep from Waterloo, it looks as though Facebook 1.6 wasn’t so far behind after all.

Facebook for BlackBerry Options Page

To say Apple’s approval process for its iTunes App Store is a bit of a black box would be an understatement.

Apple's iTunes Apple Store Approval Process Explained via Joy of Tech

One of the BlackBerry features I use most frequently is the built-in Application Switcher function, which lets you hop back and forth between open programs without navigating through multiple screens or repeatedly clicking your track ball. Until recently, I assigned the App Switcher to one of my BlackBerry Bold’s side convenience keys for easy access. But thanks to a somewhat recent tweak to Research In Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry OS, your Menu key can now be used to raise the App Switcher, freeing up a valuable convenience key--assuming you’re running the appropriate device software.

BlackBerry Application Switcher

A few weeks back at Research In Motion’s (RIM) Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES), I got a full demonstration of Technicopia’s then unreleased Gwabbit for BlackBerry application, which pulls contact information including names, addresses and phone numbers, from mail you receive on your BlackBerry device into your smartphone’s address book. I was so impressed with the application that I named it one of ten notable products in my Best of WES 2009, and today it’s publicly available for $9.99 a year.

Last week, two high-profile Hollywood personalities, actor Kevin Bacon and uber-celebutard Paris Hilton, lost their BlackBerry smartphones. Bacon’s BlackBerry was nabbed right from his hands by a NYC subway baddie as he stood on a platform waiting for a train, during the same week that Paris Hilton apparently left hers in a watering hole in Cannes, France. Both are now on damage-control patrol.

What do Kevin Bacon and Paris Hilton have in common? They both lost BlackBerrys last week.

Not one week after the first images of Research In Motion’s (RIM) unannounced Onyx 96xx, a.k.a. Driftwood, smartphone hit the Web, a handful of pics of RIM’s much anticipated BlackBerry Storm successor, currently dubbed “Storm 2,” have surfaced…and RIM’s pre-release-handheld leak-fest rolls on.

RIM BlackBerry "Storm 2"

Last week, at Research In Motion’s (RIM) annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) in Orlando, I represented CIO.com and the Mobile WorkHorse blog in a panel discussion focused on the future of the BlackBerry platform. More specifically, I, along with four of the Web’s most venerable BlackBerry-blog-smiths, offered up my top three predictions for the BlackBerry platform in the coming three years.