Citigroup’s Jim Suva was similarly unimpressed. “Our checks in several locations across the U.S. revealed no customers lines upon store door openings and no product stock outs,” he told clients today. “While many may say the Torch launch should not be compared to an iPhone launch, we remind investors that the BlackBerry Storm launch (November 2008) indeed had lines outside of many stores and many stores sold out on day 1.”

‘Course the Storm also arrived at market a week before Black Friday and the ramp-up to the annual holiday consumer binge, so folks were in more of a buying mood. And their appetite for RIM (RIMM) smartphones hadn’t yet been ruined by the Storm, which would be branded a clunky, bug-ridden disaster a few months later.

So I’m not sure it’s all that surprising that there aren’t lines around the block for the Torch, nor am I sure that it even matters. As I noted earlier, RIM’s bailiwick is enterprise, and enterprise isn’t one for camping out on sidewalks.

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.”

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Goldman Sachs’s Simona Jankowski this morning warned that the company is likely to miss consensus estimates for the quarter due to the continued weakness in its mobile devices business. Jankowski contends that handset unit sales likely declined again in the quarter on further market share losses; she also thinks that ASPs declined more than expected due to a more competitive environment, a less competitive product offering and a mix shift to the low end.

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