There is a tradeoff between direct conversion receivers' requirement for low DC offset (and good rejection of the LO) and VLIF receivers' requirement for high IP2. The paper by Crols and Steyaert provides some good explanations of this (citation below). Generally for narrower channel bandwidth systems, such as GSM, VLIF seems to be most often chosen in the past 5 to 10 years (see chipsets by SiLabs and RFMD, for example)."A single-chip 900 MHz CMOS receiver front-end with a highperformance low-IF topology"Crols, J.; Steyaert, M.S.J.Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal ofVolume 30, Issue 12, Dec 1995 Page(s):1483 - 1492Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/4.482196

thanks for the references