There has been plenty of speculation of late as to whether or not Research In Motion, the parent company of the beleaguered BlackBerry line of mobile devices, has been looking to sell itself off. But when reports landed that RIM had hired bankers to “weigh strategic options,” their stock saw a four percent hike. That's enough to suggest to a whole lot of stock buyers that someone may be planning a selloff.

RIM had actually said, back in its last earnings release, that they were planning to explore all their options in the face of declining sales and ground lost to their variety of major competitors, including Google's Android platform, Microsoft's burgeoning Windows Phone system, and of course, the Apple juggernaut. This move may simply be RIM doing as they had forecast they would back in their earnings release, or it may signal a move to make a full sale of the company.

Surprisingly, there likely would be some interest in buying RIM as a company. Despite its lower ranks in terms of sales and market share, RIM holds a variety of useful aspects to make it worthwhile to purchase, like its brand name, its distribution networks, and of course, the fact that it has market share and sales at all. This would likely draw plenty of interest from several different venues, including Google and Microsoft, who would both be interested in getting RIM's market share to give themselves a better showing against Apple, in Google's case, and against Google and Apple, in Microsoft's.

But recently, Henry Blodget detailed other companies who may be interested in getting in the market, and his list featured some much more unexpected names like Facebook, who had aspirations of a Facebook-specific smartphone to give them some control in the market instead of handing it all over to Google and Apple. Amazon was also represented, since they already had a successful bit of hardware in the Kindle Fire, so why not make the jump to smartphones?

And then there were the downright oddities like Intel, who had previously expressed interest in making smartphones, several PC makers like Dell, HP and Acer, and even fellow smartphone makers like Samsung, HTC, LG, and Nokia.

Just what RIM's plans are, as yet, are unclear, and will have to be watched over the next several months to see where they go with it. But there are more than enough possibilities in the works to make this one a distinct possibility of being a game-changer for someone.