When Blackberry’s Z10 phone hit the market last week, the response from consumers was reportedly lukewarm — although no sales figures are available yet, and Blackberry executives told The Wall Street Journal that marketing materials are just now being sent out to carriers and retailers.

The Z10, with its full-size touch screen, has already been marketed in other countries, and will be followed soon by the Blackberry Q10, a device expected to come with the hardware keyboard so popular with long-standing Blackberry fans.

For Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader, both the Z10 and the Blackberry’s rollout strategy are disappointing. “I have always been a strong supporter of Blackberry, one of the last people clinging to the ship as it sank,” he says. “But with the Z10, Blackberry has totally caved in. They are just cloning what everyone is doing.”

Rather than offering a product with all the “shiny social features” that competing phones have, Fader says that Blackberry “should have positioned the Z10 as a productivity device.  A big part of that would be the keyboard.” The better strategy would have been to introduce the keyboard phone (the Q10) first, rather than second, positioning it “as a business device that will let you do things as quickly as possible…. By leading with the Z10 instead, Blackberry shows it has given up on its former place in the market.”

Indeed, Fader adds, highlighting the return of the keyboard “would have resonated [with consumers] from a business standpoint as well as a personal one.” Blackberry missed an opportunity, he notes, “because no one owns that space.”

According to Lawrence G. Hrebiniak, Wharton emeritus professor of management, “There’s bad news and good (or less bad) news with the Z10. It looks good, is durable and well built, [offers] easy typing and a good camera, but it’s short on apps — [Blackberry] has approximately 100,000, about 12.5% of Apple’s stable. Blackberry will supposedly get more apps, but will customers bet on this? And it has a relatively high price tag — again, not good.”

Hrebiniak describes the U.S. launch as a “yawner,” almost a non-event. On the other hand, the U.S. market is “tough and saturated: Blackberry only has a 2% to 3% market share, so one might not have expected big numbers.” The company still has international markets to shoot for, including the U.K. — where its market share is 12% vs. 25% for Apple — and it has “Canada potentially backing the home town player. It also has the prospect of good corporate IT numbers. Business adoption, a traditional strength, can help again,” Hrebiniak states.

The company soon will announce Q4 sales and profits, notes Hrebiniak. “If the numbers show any positive signs from earlier introductions in Canada and the U.K., things would look less bad for the company, maybe even good. I’m not yet ready to predict Blackberry’s doom, but I’d really like to see more good, or less bad, news.”

Fader, for his part, suggests that Blackberry’s chances of remaining in business are “not looking good.” Will they still exist three years from now? “I think they will get gobbled up by someone else. The [acquirer], instead of just folding them into their existing business, will use them as the business line to complement their personal and entertainment line. I think the Blackberry name still has incredible equity and very strong associations. It’s just that they are doing everything they can to destroy it.”

Rumors surfaced last week that Facebook is gearing up to launch its own smartphone. According to Facebook employees and others who spoke with The New York Times, the firm has begun recruiting former engineers from Apple to bring its existing plans for a Facebook phone — codenamed “Buffy” — closer to fruition.

The Times article notes that Facebook is not the only software maker looking to develop its own hardware: While the social network giant was dealing with the fallout from its inauspicious late May market debut, Google quietly completed its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola, “which could lead to the search giant’s making its own smartphone.”

And while integrating software and hardware may be the ultimate goal for many tech companies in a post-Apple world, some observers are not convinced that introducing its own smartphone would be the right move for Facebook. “[It] makes no sense at all — slightly more sensible than a Facebook dishwasher, but not quite as sensible as a Facebook toaster, which would alert all your friends every time you make toast,” says Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader. “I can’t imagine why they would want to get into such a competitive, commoditized market, and what they would hope to get out of it.”

But Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow, who co-directs the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative along with Fader, takes a different view. Bradlow notes that firms like Facebook “are realizing that today, the ‘point of entry’ onto the web plays a big role.” As an example, he cites Amazon’s Kindle device, which the company sells to consumers for a price that is below its manufacturing cost. Why? “Because then the portal to Amazon products is at the touch of a finger — and the [customer lifetime value] for the person, despite the loss leader on the device, is still very positive.” Moreover, Facebook needs to protect its long-term consumer base, he adds. “Imagine that everyone starts walking around with Google phones, then all of a sudden Google+ becomes the social network hub.” 

The bottom line, according to Bradlow and other analysts, is that as users increasingly rely on their mobile devices to connect to the web, Facebook needs to follow suit — or be left behind. In fact, prior to its IPO, Facebook conceded that the challenges of gaining traction in the mobile market pose a potential risk for the firm — an admission which some analysts believe partly accounts for the stock’s dismal performance.

According to Kendall Whitehouse, Wharton director of new media, it isn’t clear that hardware is the only way for Facebook to balance the equation. Instead, the firm might simply need stronger mobile app development. He points to Twitter as one example of software that translates exceptionally well to a mobile environment, “because its interface is simple and elegant.” That’s not the case for Facebook, which is crammed with features and has an interface that is anything but simple. His advice? “Use the employees at Instagram” — the mobile photo application firm that Facebook recently purchased for $1 billion — “to develop a really good mobile app.”

On Tuesday, Research In Motion (RIM) announced that it will not make a profit this quarter — a big fall for a firm that was named the world’s fastest-growing company only three years ago by Fortune magazine. RIM also noted that it is working with two banks, J.P. Morgan Securities and RBC Capital Markets, to review its strategic options — a move that has many analysts wondering if the firm is looking to sell off all or parts of its business.

Following the profit warning, RIM’s stock fell 7.8% on Wednesday, bringing its market capitalization to below $6 billion. (It was $40 billion early last year.) Not surprisingly, it has been a tough time for RIM. The company’s BlackBerry smartphone has lost significant ground to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android devices, and last fall, its proprietary server network suffered high-profile blackouts affecting millions of subscribers. According to The Wall Street Journal, RIM’s share of the smartphone market fell below 10% this year.

What went wrong for RIM? Wharton management professor Daniel Levinthal says that “the longstanding problem and lost opportunity for RIM has been not decoupling their enterprise software from the [BlackBerry] device. Selling devices and software as a bundle didn’t matter that much in the world before [the advent of] ‘apps.’ But, once the Apple and Google/Android app ecosystems emerged, RIM as a standalone provider was no longer viable.”

Some analysts have suggested that RIM, which is gearing up for the rollout of a new operating system and series of phones, should get out of the hardware business altogether and focus on licensing its secure email system to other handset makers, or to companies like Google or Microsoft that would want access to RIM’s enterprise clients. However, Levinthal notes, “the window as a provider of enterprise software to a wide set of handset manufacturers is closing rapidly as a number of start-up companies are now focusing on providing that service to corporate clients.”

Others, like Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader, believe it might be too late for RIM to save itself. Still, he offers some advice: “Here’s what they should have done a few months ago, and should still try today: Focus on their strengths. They have a huge base of loyal, profitable users. Stop trying to mimic — or even compete with — Apple or the other producers of shiny objects.”

According to Fader, the company needs to “play to its business base as well as to consumers who [have] the same attributes” — such as little time for, or interest in, apps; a desire for real keyboards; a need for secure service and a preference for the company’s “good-but-not-as-novel-as-before” BlackBerry Messenger service. “That’s a whole lot of people, and none of the shiny-object producers have really won them over yet.”

Fader speaks from personal experience. “I’m loyal to my ancient BlackBerry and never want to give it up. I wish [RIM] gave me more reasons not to leave them when my battle-scarred, old phone dies” — which likely will be soon, he adds.

Here’s a trend you might not expect: According to a report by Bloomberg, high-profile retailers like J.C. Penney, Nordstrom, Gap and Gamestop have quietly shut down their Facebook “stores” during the last year.

These “stores” are essentially apps that enable customers to view a retailer’s merchandise from the company’s Facebook page, select items and complete a sale without having to leave the social networking site. Allowing users to shop seamlessly while engaging in social media sounds good in theory — but the results have been poor.

One reason? Users have found it easier to navigate and make purchases through the retailers’ own websites. “Whereas [brand] websites can categorize and organize social media, blogging and other engagement devices in a form that is easily navigated and searched, this is not true of Facebook, where all relevant postings are listed in a linear order based on time of posting,” notes Wharton marketing professor Stephen Hoch. “My guess is that Facebook is actively working on how brands can better link their brand pages to their [own] websites.”

The Bloomberg article also notes that the retailers’ merchandise selections were the same on Facebook as on their own sites, offering little incentive for users to engage in shopping while socializing online. “It was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar,” Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru told Bloomberg. One executive the publication interviewed added: “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”

“Some platforms simply aren’t destined to support commercial activities,” says Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader. “Remember all the promise — and ultimate disappointment — associated with [merchandising in] virtual worlds such as Second Life? That wasn’t the first letdown of this sort, and Facebook won’t be the last.” 

Companies have had good reason to believe in the promise of “F-commerce.” With 845 million active users, it’s hard to overlook the social networking giant as a possible retail channel. What’s more, retailers have achieved some valuable brand-building through the site: Gap, alone, has 5.6 million Facebook “fans” for its Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic pages, according to Bloomberg. “Brands clearly recognize that Facebook has incredible reach and can help them engage with a larger audience than the one already engaged with the brand’s internal website,” Hoch says. “It also seems to me that brands need to continue to invest in social media in advance of clear payout metrics, for future option value if nothing else.”

Retailers have an obligation “to dip their toes in the water, with the expectation that there will be as many misses as hits,” Fader adds. “The hope is that they can genuinely learn from each of these experiences, not only to put them in a better position to capitalize on the next emerging platform, but also to bring some of these [lessons] back to their core business. That’s just the way things work today, and it’s a pattern that will likely recur for years ahead.”