Seems news of the RIM’s (RIMM) lower phone shipments has compounded fears that it is losing ground to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and the conga line of new Android handsets that have debuted recently.

Simona Jankowski of Goldman Sachs (GS) took a particularly dim view of Research in Motion’s performance, suggesting that there may be grave reasons for the decline in phone shipments RIM suffered during the quarter (the company shipped 10.5 million devices; analysts were looking for 11 million).

“Evidence [suggests] that the structural competitive issues are starting to weigh on its growth prospects,” Jankowski wrote. “We estimate that RIM’s U.S. business declined 15% [quarter-over-quarter]–the second q-o-q decline in a row, and the first [year-over-year] decline.”

Jankowski questions the official Research in Motion explanation. “While RIM attributed that to an inventory reduction at a North America customer, we think the magnitude of the decline points more to lower demand at Verizon as a result of its endorsement of Android; our checks showed a dramatic reduction in the number of RIM [phones] at Verizon last quarter and better sales for Motorola’s DROID than for RIM at many Verizon stores.”

The implication here is that RIM’s BlackBerry devices are losing their appeal as the market becomes more enamored of super-smartphones. While RIM may hold the lead in email-based smartphones, it’s not worth much as the market’s focus shifts to smartphones with vast application ecosystems.

As Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder observed in a note to clients this morning, “Weak offerings in [touchscreen phones] and 3G leave [RIM] heavily exposed to a slew of new smartphones now hitting the market. While it will certainly maintain its lead in email-based smartphones, we see little chance it can sustain its market share, pricing or margins long-term.”

In other words, RIM needs a new phone–a competitive phone. Desperately. Thankfully, company co-CEO Jim Balsillie says one is on the way. “I can’t talk about what’s not announced,” he said on an earnings call with analysts Wednesday. “If you saw the road map, you’d be blown away.”

I certainly hope so. Because without a worthy rival to the iPhone, Droid, Nexus One, et al, things will only grow worse, particularly if that CDMA iPhone rumored to be on its way to Verizon materializes. Said Citigroup (C) analyst Jim Suva: “We simply don’t want to be owners of RIM shares when Verizon gets the iPhone.”

Consider this from J.P. Morgan analyst Rod Hall: “No matter how good the product, we believe that penetrating the channel will continue to be difficult for Palm and will only get tougher as more competitive touch handsets come to market through the year.”

And this from UBS analyst Maynard Um: “Demand weakness is not necessarily a surprise as we noted earlier that a slowing US net add environment would likely have the greatest impact on Palm given its small base. However, the magnitude is slightly surprising to us given management’s prior conviction & visibility to orders. While Palm cites deferral of orders to future periods, WebOS demand will likely be called into question. With the US market being Palm’s best opportunity for more levered growth, we are more concerned with the future growth opportunity.”

Finally, there’s this from Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg, who says it’s going to take a long, long time for Palm’s fundamentals to improve, given its weak traction in the smartphone market: “Our concern now is that bad publicity feeds on itself, with the poor stock price performance denting Palm’s brand and causing potential carrier partners to lose interest,” he wrote in a note to clients.

“There are also potential upside risks as well including the potential for Palm to be acquired, but we think the poor showing to date limits the company’s negotiating leverage,” Goldberg added. Ultimately, we think Palm has the resources to survive and potentially build its position back, but it will take considerable time and they face serious risks in the interim.”

Serious risks, indeed. If Palm (PALM) has fared this poorly in the smartphone market of 2009, how will it fare in the smartphone market of 2010 and the more formidable rivals the year brings with it?

It was hard enough to compete against Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry last year. In 2010, Palm must compete with these popular smartphones and a host of new Android phones, not to mention some impressive Windows Mobile 7 devices heading to market. No easy task, particularly when carrier partners like Verizon (VZ) and Sprint (S) don’t quite seem to be giving Palm devices the marketing push they need to succeed.

In a note to investors this morning, Pali analyst Walter Piecyk says he’s not buying predictions about Sprint (S) returning to growth in 2010. Sure, the company is improving post-paid subscriber losses, says Piecyk, but not as quickly as it needs to. And its prepaid business, which already faces a fair bit of competition, will be confronted with even more competition next year.

“Over the past six months our concerns have been rising over the slow pace of change at Sprint and what we view as lost opportunities for growth, but we maintained our Buy rating due to the low valuation on the stock and the depressed expectations of investors,” Piecyk writes.

“Those concerns increased in recent months as the pre-paid business, which Sprint has been accessing for growth, became more competitive and Verizon began executing on a more open device strategy,” the analyst adds. “In the past few weeks, investors have become more optimistic about positive post-paid signs early in Q4 and Sprint’s prospects of even stronger pre-paid results in 2010, in the face of increasing competition.”

In contrast, Piecyk notes that “We are less confident about those trends and as we model out a more competitive market in 2010 for all our companies it becomes evident to us that Sprint will be challenged to stabilize EBITDA. Faced with negative catalysts in the months ahead and the challenge of appropriately valuing a company whose EBITDA is in perpetual decline, we believe now is the right time to downgrade the stock to Neutral.”

Wall Street, then, isn’t underestimating Sprint’s prospects for 2010. It’s overestimating them–or at least it certainly was yesterday.

“For 2010, we expect post-paid losses to be pared by 35% to 2.3 million subs lost compared to our prior estimate of less than 2 million subs lost in that year,” Piecyk concludes. “While pre-paid net adds might offset the losses or even top post-paid losses in Q4 we expect the total customer base to decline by 700,000 in 2010.”

At $12.34, Palm (PALM) is up well over seven percent as I write this, a nice gain that more than offset the four percent drop the company’s shares suffered last week. Clearly, the market is expecting a lot of the Pixi, and according to some analysts, it may get it. In a note to clients Friday, RBC analysts said they “expect positive consumer reception and healthy sell-through,” for the Pixi.

But not everyone agrees with RBC’s cheery assessment. Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Northeast Securities, has a much dimmer view of Palm’s prospects in the months ahead. He says his sell-through checks show a “substantial decline” in recent Pre sales.

“As a fading brand, carriers are likely to see better returns on their promotional and advertising dollars with other vendors,” Kumar writes. “WebOS has negligible smartphone OS share, 0.2 percent per Gartner estimates, and is unlikely to attract any meaningful third-party application support. Palm has bet the farm on webOS and there is a real possibility that they may not achieve critical mass.”

Perhaps. Perhaps not. We’ll see in the months ahead.

But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near term, they look terrible.

In the first three months of this year, the New York Times Company (NYT) lost $74.5 million, or 34 cents a share once you factor out one-time charges, on revenue of $609 million. That’s worse than Wall Street’s low expectations of a five-cent loss on revenue of $630.8 million.

The reason, of course, is that the ad market is miserable in general, and even more so for newspapers. The company’s ad revenue was down 27 percent, notably worse than the awful 17.6 percent decline the Times recorded in the last quarter of 2008.

And as in the last quarter, former bright spots like the Internet business have now gone dark as well: Internet revenue was down 5.6 percent, Internet ad sales declined 6.1 percent, and revenue at the Times’s About.com unit dropped 4.7 percent.

Expect more of the same for the second quarter of this year, warns CEO Janet Robinson: “At this time, and it is early in the quarter, we believe the rate of decline in ad revenues in the second quarter will be similar to that of the first.”

The Times has been trimming costs (via salary cuts and layoffs) and has bought itself a bit of breathing room by getting rid of its dividend, taking on a very expensive loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and selling off assets like its Manhattan headquarters. It still has some moves it can make–it is trying to unload its stake in the Boston Red Sox and to find a buyer for the Boston Globe.

But at some point it’s going to have find a way to start selling more ads again. Because awards alone won’t save the paper–Pulitzers can’t even guarantee their winners’ continued employment.

The Times has stopped providing monthly revenue updates, but it has been pretty good about providing detail via its earnings calls. I’ll be on the road during today’s 11 a.m. call, but will check the transcript and get back to you later with the most interesting nuggets.

If Apple is indeed preparing to offer the iPhone 3G in China in partnership with China Unicom, its sales prospects are looking pretty damn good. Bank of America analyst Scott Craig believes the company could claim as much as a fifth of the smartphone market in China when it launches the device there–and in relatively short order. “Our Asia supply chain checks seem to indicate that Apple believes it can achieve an initial penetration rate, least on a sell-in basis, similar to the iPhone launch in the U.S. (about 20 percent),” Craig wrote in a recent research note. “In fact, given our channel checks in Asia, Apple likely believes it can easily meet (and likely exceed) this and/or believes in other scenarios that result in much higher unit sales levels.”

Craig estimates that Apple (AAPL) can sell 1.5 million iPhones in China in calendar 2009, assuming a midyear release and a price-point of $500-$600. He sees the company selling a further 4.6 million in calendar 2010, and 5.8 million in calendar 2011. That’s a hell of a lot of iPhones. But given the strong gray market interest in China already and the fact that China Unicom’s customer base at 150 million is roughly twice the size of AT&T Wireless, it doesn’t seem like all that much of a stretch.

If Apple is indeed preparing to offer the iPhone 3G in China in partnership with China Unicom, its sales prospects are looking pretty damn good. Bank of America analyst Scott Craig believes the company could claim as much as a fifth of the smartphone market in China when it launches the device there–and in relatively short order. “Our Asia supply chain checks seem to indicate that Apple believes it can achieve an initial penetration rate, least on a sell-in basis, similar to the iPhone launch in the U.S. (about 20 percent),” Craig wrote in a recent research note. “In fact, given our channel checks in Asia, Apple likely believes it can easily meet (and likely exceed) this and/or believes in other scenarios that result in much higher unit sales levels.”

Craig estimates that Apple (AAPL) can sell 1.5 million iPhones in China in calendar 2009, assuming a midyear release and a price-point of $500-$600. He sees the company selling a further 4.6 million in calendar 2010, and 5.8 million in calendar 2011. That’s a hell of a lot of iPhones. But given the strong gray market interest in China already and the fact that China Unicom’s customer base at 150 million is roughly twice the size of AT&T Wireless, it doesn’t seem like all that much of a stretch.