This week in mobile news, Apple’s new iPhone 4S delighted early adopters, while its iOS 5 received a mixed bag of reviews following the much-anticipated Wednesday launch. Meanwhile, Blackberry users across five continents fumed as a massive outage cut off access to email and Web services for several days. We’ll explore these stories, as well as interesting new industry data predicting Android’s ascendancy, in this week’s Fiksu Feed.

It’s been a tough week for Blackberry. The highly publicized, multi-day Blackberry outage frustrated millions of smartphone users around the globe and put more pressure on Research In Motion for sweeping changes. On Thursday, the company announced that it had resolved its technical issues, but that it would likely take a while for service to return to normal. New York Times has more here.

In other news, Apple’s brand new operating system, iOS 5, made a huge splash this week. It’s virtually impossible to open a newspaper, surf the Web or jump on your favorite social networking channel without getting caught up in conversations about its 200+ new features. Jason Gilbert of Huffington Post calls it a "must-have" in this in-depth feature. However, as is often the case with new operating systems, many consumers reported frustratingly long download times and bugs as they installed iOS 5. David Martin of Cult of Mac offers trouble-shooting tips for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users here.

Tech reporters across the industry are buzzing with glowing reviews of Apple’s latest device, iPhone 4S. In his review round-up citing GigaOM and AllThingsD among others, Appolicious’ Phil Hornshaw notes that “most of the reviews acknowledge that the phone isn’t too vastly different from the current version of the iPhone, although it is pretty well improved. If you’re due for an upgrade or new to the iPhone (or you just can’t wait), it sounds like you won’t be disappointed.”

Despite the seemingly ubiquitous obsession with all things Apple, the company’s days as the undisputed “king of apps” may be numbered, reports TIME’s Graeme McMillan. Research from Xyologic indicates that Apple’s monthly app download rate currently surpasses Android by two times. However, the company predicts that Android’s app downloads will overtake Apple’s by June 2012. This is due in part to Android’s ever-increasing popularity in overseas markets, coupled with the growing number of apps available in the Android Market.

The two horse race is clearly on and it’s apparent that mobile app marketers need to take a closer look at the opportunity that an Android app presents. In fact, Fiksu released new data earlier this week revealing that, on average, Android app users are two times more loyal than iOS app users. If you haven’t already, we encourage you to check out our blog post here. And read what MediaPost’s Steve Smith and ReadWriteWeb’s Dan Rowinski had to say about our findings.

Another week, another prediction about the ever-increasing appetite for mobile apps. Sarah Perez of TechCrunch reported on new research from analyst firm Berg Insight, revealing that mobile app downloads will reach 98 billion by 2015. Additionally, app store revenue is also expected to reach $11.8 billion by 2015. See here for additional study findings.