Oh, how RIM has fallen. Once the undisputed master of the American smartphone landscape, the BlackBerry maker is plummeting daily in market share and consumer esteem. Will new CEO Thorsten Heins' Tuesday keynote at the annual BlackBerry World trade show help reverse the company's decline? That's what our Analyst Alex Colon will be looking out for at the show in Orlando this week.

Waiting for BB10, Showing BB7?

For RIM, the holy grail is its new BlackBerry operating system, BB10. The company confirmed that it won't be showing any BB10-based consumer devices at BlackBerry World, but that it will be handing out developer units, hacked-together BB10 phones that aren't retail-ready. We'll still scope out the developer phone to see what the BB10 experience will be like. Will it be radical and compelling enough to face down Windows 8, Google, and Apple this fall?

If RIM isn't putting out any new BB10 phones before the fall, it still needs devices to carry through the spring and summer - especially in countries like Indonesia, where BlackBerrys are still hot enough to cause riots when new models hit shelves. Executives and government officials still loyal to BlackBerry may also want to see some new units. Will RIM unveil some new BB7 BlackBerries to tide consumers over until BB10? When I asked the company, it specifically refused to give a yes or no answer, so it's a possibility.

RIM's tablet, the BlackBerry Playbook, hasn't sold many units. But RIM is in the tablet game for the long haul, and it might be able to stave off the hunger for BB10 phones by introducing new PlayBook models. Rumors have included a 10-inch PlayBook or a PlayBook with built-in cellular networking, which has been promised practically since the PlayBook was first announced.

All a Disappointment?

There's one other possibility: RIM releases no hardware, and its only announcements are developer tools to help apps transition to BB10 and management software for existing BlackBerry installs.

The company has been trickling out software and service announcements over the last two months, and it could just rehash them. BlackBerry Mobile Fusion is an impressive tool to let IT managers control Android, iOS, and BlackBerry phones from their corporate console. RIM is also likely to deliver some rah-rah lectures about HTML5 app development and how BB10 will run old BlackBerry apps, new custom apps, and Android apps alike. We've heard this all before.

I'm desperately hoping this isn't the case. It's not because Mobile Fusion isn't useful software (it is) and HTML5 isn't the future (it may be), but because it doesn't raise RIM's pulse rate. RIM rejected former CEO Jim Balsillie's plan to become a software-and-services company in favor of continuing to be a hardware company. But with that strategy comes a responsibility to churn out some hardware.

Check back for the news from BlackBerry World Tuesday and Wednesday here on PCMag.