"The struggling smartphone maker BlackBerry Ltd. said on Monday that it was exploring a potential sale of the company or a joint venture, as it continued to cast about for a solution to its troubles," reports the New York Times’ Dealbook blog.

The Canadian company, formerly called Research in Motion, "introduced its BlackBerry 10 this year in a make-or-break attempt to recover at least some of its once-dominant position in the market," the story reports. "But the phones arrived just as the high end of the smartphone market appeared to be saturated with Apple iPhones and handsets from Samsung and others using the Google Android operating system. BlackBerry’s innovations were also more incremental than revolutionary."

The article continues, "A report last week by IDC, a company that tracks technology sales, found that despite its new phones, BlackBerry had fallen into fourth place in the global market behind devices using Windows Phone. IDC estimated BlackBerry’s worldwide market share at 2.9 percent."

Says a Bloomberg story on the BlackBerry situation, "BlackBerry fired 5,000 workers last year as part of a plan to eliminate $1 billion in operating costs. Analysts had expected the cutbacks to help the company post a profit last quarter. Instead, BlackBerry lost $84 million, dragged down by the sluggish sales of the BlackBerry Z10. The new touch-screen phone, introduced at a lavish event in New York in January, missed estimates by almost a million units last quarter. The company is projecting another loss for the current period."

Another possibility for BlackBerry is that the company will be taken private, according to a number of media reports.