It's easy to form sets of five mutually-tangent spheres (say, three equal spheres with centers on an equilateral triangle, and two more spheres with their centers on the line perpendicular to the triangle through its centroid). Based on this, I think it should be possible to construct a set of spheres analogous to the Moser spindle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadwiger–Nelson_problem] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadwiger%E2%80%93Nelson_problem] that requires six colors: spheres a, b, and c, where a and b have four mutual neighbors that are all adjacent to each other, a and c have another four mutual neighbors that are all adjacent to each other, neither a and b nor a and c are adjacent, but b and c are adjacent.
I have no idea how tight this lower bound might be, but it's at least better than four.
