In a research note to clients today, Piper Jaffray analyst T. Michael Walkley says his checks this month and last suggest the BlackBerry is losing momentum at the country’s largest wireless carriers, mostly to handsets running Google’s (GOOG) Android OS.

“While BlackBerry remains a leading smartphone brand, our checks indicate potential sell-through share losses at AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile,” Walkley writes. “In fact, we believe the Bold 9700 continued to lose smartphone share at AT&T following a price increase last month to $199.”

There’s worse. “In addition, our checks indicated further share losses to Android products at T-Mobile and Verizon. At Verizon, our checks indicated slowing RIM sales, as sales managers continue to push Android products such as the HTC Incredible and Motorola Droid. At T-Mobile, our checks indicate weaker BlackBerry sales due to strong sales of Android products such as the HTC MyTouch and the Windows based HTC HD2.”

But RIM’s situation isn’t dire. RIM is one of the five largest mobile phone manufacturers in the world and it makes only smartphones. Still, these market trends are worth keeping an eye on, particularly the likely arrival of a new iPhone at AT&T (T) this summer and a handful of slick new Android smartphones at Verizon (VZ).

While the new Blackberry Bold 9650 and the Pearl 3G might fend off those devices in the enterprise market relatively easily, they’re likely to have a harder time of it in the consumer market.

Terms of Nokia’s (NOK) acquisition, which is expected to close during the June quarter, were not disclosed.

Evidently, clicking on a contentious query more than a few times invites a block that requires users to restart their browsers in order to regain access to the site. So Google.com.hk, the uncensored site to which Google (GOOG) has been redirecting Chinese searchers, is still available in China, but it’s usefulness has obviously been undermined. Oddly, Google’s Mainland China Service Availability page doesn’t seem to have noticed this yet.

Meanwhile, Tom.com stopped using Google to power its searches, and rumors are beginning to circulate that some of the country’s mobile operators are reconsidering plans to launch new phones running on Google’s Android OS.

Reached for comment, Google didn’t have much to offer: “It seems that certain sensitive queries are being blocked,” a spokesperson told me. “However, the Google.com.hk site is not currently being blocked.”

Yep.

To its credit, Google (GOOG) has never said otherwise. But Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney takes a stab at guesstimating exactly how many new phones the search giant will sell and what that means for its earnings. Answers: Not a lot and not much.

Specifically, Mahaney thinks Google might ship one million to three million phones in the first year, which could generate up to $1.6 billion in additional revenue, and perhaps another 55 cents in earnings per share. That’s about half the estimate from Douglas Anmuth of Barclays (BCS) earlier this month. Mahaney cites both Flurry’s modest first-week sales estimates as well as internal Citigroup (C) research, to support his numbers.

He also provides some interesting context via this table, which compares the first-year sales for Apple’s (AAPL) various iPhones, Palm’s (PALM) Pre and Pixi models, and Motorola’s (MOT) Droid, which of course uses Google’s Android OS, just like the Nexus One. Click to enlarge:

One sort-of throwaway point: Mahaney notes that any benefit the Nexus One generates for Google this year may end up balancing out the money it could lose if it leaves China.

According to retail checks conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst T. Michael Walkley, the BlackBerry slowed as the summer kicked off and AT&T (T) and Sprint (S) began peddling new smartphone offerings from Apple (AAPL) and Palm (PALM).

“Our checks indicated BlackBerry sales declined in June at AT&T and Sprint due to increasing smartphone competition, as BlackBerry sales appeared to lose share to the Palm Pre at Sprint and the new 3GS iPhone and older $99 iPhone at AT&T,” Walkey wrote in a research note to clients. “BlackBerry sales at T-Mobile remained solid, but Verizon sales were slightly weaker following the termination of the buy one, get one promotion.”

Unfortunate news for RIM (RIMM), but perhaps to be expected given the lackadaisical evolution of the company’s product line. New devices with advanced features, not incremental improvements, are what it’s going to take to compete the with iPhone and Pre, and soon, with the G2, the latest phone based on Google’s (GOOG) Android OS.

Consider this: A recent ChangeWave survey of over 4,000 respondents found that more than 14 percent plan to purchase a smartphone in the next 90 days. Of those, 44 percent said they plan to buy an iPhone, compared to 23 percent who said they’ll opt for a BlackBerry (click on chart below to enlarge).

Google Android OS was developed for smart phones, but it’s proven attractive to makers of other devices, like netbooks, for its potential to break their dependency on Microsoft software and Intel (INTC) chips.

Unlike Microsoft’s Windows software–which most netbooks currently use–Android is free. And it runs on chips that use ARM architecture, which are made by companies other than Intel. As the WSJ reported in April, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has been looking at Android for possible future netbooks.

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