Are you an iPhone or a Blackberry? That’s been the major question for smartphone owners. I know there’s plenty of other quality brands out there, but it seemed that for the last few years, you were either with Apple or Research in Motion. Today, while the iPhone can’t be declared the clear cut winner, Blackberry is certainly on the ropes.

Shares in RIM dropped 2% today to fall to $18.91 at the close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Even if you don’t know anything about the stock market, it’s not hard to see that a decrease is bad. But what’s worse about this news for RIM is that the price per share has fallen below its “book value”, according to Bloomberg. Book value essentially calculates the difference between a company’s assets and liabilities. The closer you get to $0, the less profitable a company is. So, investors aren’t very confident in RIM’s abilities to make money. Are they just hesitant to go through the tough times with the company, or are people looking to abandon a sinking ship?

Now, this doesn’t mean that RIM and/or the Blackberry are dead. But it is certainly alarming news for a company that seems to have done nothing but regress lately. At its best times, RIM was valued at around $20 billion. Now, it is clearly in a much more difficult, pivotal time in its existence. One analyst has forecasted that there is a 50% chance RIM shares could fall even further, to $10 within the next year.

Some people blame the failure of the Blackberry Playbook to catch on, while others are blaming the leadership of co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Ballsillie. Others point to strong competition, not just from Apple’s iPhone (and other iProducts), but also the strides that companies like Google have made to grab a piece of the smartphone market. Like most of these things, it’s probably a combination of all of those aspects, along with other intangible factors that nobody could be able to figure out.

Personally, I like my Blackberry. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer having a physical keyboard rather than a touch screen, as well as BBM (when it works). Guess I could be forced to consider a replacement – like apparently many people have already done, to put RIM in this situation in the first place.