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Feeling overloaded with BlackBerry news and rumors? We know the feeling. We hear new things almost every day, and it can be tough to keep up with it all. that’s why we’re bringing you BlackBerry News from the Wire every Thursday.

We’ll catch you up on everything ‘Berry that happened over the course of the week. Not only that, but we’ll rank ‘em by importance, so you can more easily skim the items and read the ones of most significance. If you only have time to read one article, for instance, you might want to head down to our 5-star section. It’s All the BlackBerry News Fit to Geek.

BlackBerry user base now leans consumer
Once upon a time, a BlackBerry was mostly for the corporate type who needed to stay in contact via email when away from the office. That’s all changed over the last three or four years, and has really changed this year. Speaking of his company’s earnings report, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said that the company’s non-corporate subscribers broke the 50 percent barrier in the first quarter. I’d heard a 60/40 or 55/45 split in favor of enterprise as late as last year, but apparently that’s changed quickly. RIM added 3.8 million users in its first quarter, 80 percent of which were non-corporate users. Perhaps this is one reason why some don’t expect RIM to lose out at the hands of the iPhone and Pre.

The best and worst of App World
Now that we’ve had a month or two to take in BlackBerry App World, we’re starting to see a bit more written about it. This time it’s PC World’s Yardena Arar, who looks at the best and worst applications. The best are pretty safe picks: Evernote, Slacker, and a few others. The worst feature some clunkers: Girls Night Out Solitaire and AutoTimeZone, which purportedly calibrates your time zone automatically, but which Arar had a bit of trouble with. Click to check out all 10 apps.

BlackBerry Onyx to get optical trackpad
Last week we learned that the BlackBerry Onyx will be in the Bold family as the 9020. So it’s getting somewhat close to release, I suppose. The one thing we didn’t see on it was the optical trackpad, which the BlackBerry Gemini will feature. Ah, but it looks like RIM pulled a fast one. Kevin at CrackBerry got a pre-production Onyx a bit back for review, and it had the normal trackball. The newest model now has the optical trackpad, which is just awesome. He’s got some theories on why it has only shown up on recent pre-production models. In any case, it’ll be interesting to see industry reaction to this, especially when we get six months, a year after release. Will it solve the problem some people have with a flimsy trackball?

Flash coming to smartphones this year
It’s the moment BBGeeks have been waiting for: Adobe will bring its signature Flash to smartphones this year. This will soup of the Web browsing experience like crazy, allowing for a lot more in-browser media. Bad news, though: while Adobe plans an October release for Flash Player 10 on some smartphones, it won’t be ready for BlackBerry by then. Good news: Adobe is working with RIM, so it’s coming sometime relatively soon. They’re just not far along enough to announce anything. Oh well. Better late than never.

BOLT browser hits 1 million installs
The folks at Bitstream hit a milestone this past week, as they hit one million downloads in their public beta run. That’s pretty impressive for beta software, especially a Web browser. They’re working on some more features, too, so we could see another release in the not so distant future. You can get BOLT at boltbrowser.com.

Your BlackBerry could save your life
Dramatic headline, sure, but in this case a BlackBerry actually did save someone’s life. Via CrackBerry, we learn of a woman trapped in a trunk for two days, who was found in part because a friend left his BlackBerry in her car. According to her story, two masked men broke into her house and kidnapped her. It’s an odd story, for sure, but the BlackBerry ended up helping police save the day. We’re just glad she’s alright.

The complete guide to UberTwitter. They just released a new public beta this week, so we took the opportunity to uncover every nook and cranny of the app.

Manage BlackBerry files with BBFileScout. This is free file management software, and it’s really good. Check it out.

OtterBox Defender Case for the Storm. Cooper takes a look at the heavy-duty Storm case from OtterBox.

Gmail BlackBerry app to get push. The catch: you gotta pay. It’s available only to Premier Edition and Education Edition users. So the one-way sync will still have to suffice. Oh, what it would be to have a two-way sync. Le sigh.

Establishing proper BlackBerry etiquette. What’s proper and what’s not? There are no hard and fast rules, but maybe there should be.

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