By Jim Dalrymple,

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and RIM executives have been in a war of words lately about the company that sells more smartphones, but a new report by Strategy Analytics can finish the battle.

According to its report, Strategy Analytics says that Apple passed RIM in global smartphone shipments for the third quarter of 2010. The data shows that RIM shipped 12.3 million smartphones for the quarter and Apple shipped 15.4 million.

Nokia remains the global leader, shipping 26.5 million smartphones during the third quarter, reportstheAppleBlog.com.

The popularity of touch screens and more advancedoperating systems saw the overall smartphone market grow by 78 percent annually. In the quarter, global smartphone shipments reached 77 million devices.

During its fourth quarter conference call, Jobs had some harsh words for RIM and its business moving forward.

“We’ve now passed RIM. And I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future. They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort, into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company. I think it’s going to be a challenge for them to create a competitive platform and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third software platform after iOS and Android. With 300,000 apps on Apple’s App Store, RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb.”

However, co-CEO Jim Balsillie said RIM the next day with a few pieces of his own. For those of us who live outside the distortion field Apple, we know that 7-inch tablet will actually be a large market and we know that Adobe Flash really means something to customers who want a real web experience.

We also know that although Apple’s attempt to control the ecosystem and maintaining a closed platform can be good for Apple, developers will have more choice and customers want complete access to an overwhelming majority sites that use Flash. We believe that many customers are tired of knowing what to think of Apple.

And by the way, RIM has achieved record shipments for five consecutive quarters and recently shared guidance of 13.8 – 14.4 million BlackBerry smartphones for the current quarter.

Apple’s preference to compare its September-ending quarter with RIM’s August-ending quarter doesn’t tell the whole story because it doesn’t take into account that industry demand in September is typically stronger than summer months, nor does it explain why Apple only shipped 8.4 million devices in its prior quarter and whether Apple’s Q4 results were padded by unfulfilled Q3 customer demand and channel orders. As usual, whether the subject is antennas, Flash or shipments, there is more to the story and sooner or later, even people inside the distortion field will begin to resent being told half a story.”