This Morning: Potential RIM Breakup, Real RIM Downgrade, and More on Smartphones

Here are some things going on this morning in your world of tech:

Brutal morning for equities generally, with all the major U.S. indices sliding. The�Nasdaq Composite�Index is off 52.31, or 1.8%, at 2,840. European banks‘ woes are the proximate cause for this morning’s slip.

Shares of Research in motion�(RIMM) are down 76 cents, or almost 8%, at $9.10, surrendering pre-market gains they had racked up after a piece yesterday in the U.K.’s Sunday Times�by Ben Marlow and Simon Duke claime that the “Embattled BlackBerry maker plans break-up,” specifically, that it “could” sell the handset unit and then the sell its messaging network operating separately. The authors don’t mention what sources, if any, they have for the report.

They offer a quote from activist investor Jaguar Financial, which has pushed for a break-up. Jaguar’s Victor Alboini is quoted as saying, “�This is a clubby, cosy board,” with regard to RIM’s directors. “These are desperate times and they cannot afford to sit still.” (Subscription required to read Sunday Times articles.)

Meantime, RIM shares got a no-confidence vote this morning from Morgan Stanley‘s Ehud Gelblum from Equal Weight to Underweight, citing “deteriorating fundamentals,” in a continuation of downbeat notes on the stock in advance of its fiscal Q1 earnings report, expected this Thursday afternoon.

Speaking of RIMM, there’s a flurry of activity this morning regarding the smartphone�market more broadly. Goldman Sach’s Simona Jankowski cut her smartphone unit growth forecast for this year to 38% growth from a prior expectation for 42% growth, citing an 80% correlation between GDP growth, which is slipping, and handset growth.

Bernstein Research’s Stacy Rasgon, who covers Qualcomm (QCOM), meantime, digs into the various factors that could impact the chip maker, chief among which is a slowdown in sales of Apple‘s (AAPL) iPhone ahead of the expected introduction of a new model this fall. He sees some hit to Qualcomm’s chipset sales in the September quarter, and possibly to its license revenue in the December quarter.

Shares of Qualcomm are off $1.83, or 3.3%, at $53.81, while Apple stock is down $9.12, or 1.6%, at $579.98.

Speaking of smartphones, Samsung Electronics (005930KS) expects it may sell 10 million of its “Galaxy S III” model, which just went on sale, through the end of July, the company’s telecom director, JK Shin, is quoted as saying by Reuters’s Miyoung Kim.

And, to return to the Sunday Times for a moment, Nic Fildes this morning writes that the success of the unit “gives Samsung a headache” because it has not been able to get supply of key components fast enough to keep inventory at comfortable levels in the U.S.

Samsung stock fell over 4% in Taipei trading overnight to close at ?1,132,000.

In upgrade news, Canaccord’s Bobby Burleson raised his rating on shares of Nvidia (NVDA) to Buy from Hold, and raised his price target to $16 from $13, arguing that its “Tegra” mobile application processor and “Kepler” graphics processor will offset any injury from a soft PC market.

Nvidia shares this morning are down 30 cents, or 2.4%, at $12.69.

And shares of Red Hat were initiated by Scott Zeller of Needham & Co. with a Buy rating and a $63 price target, with Zeller writing that open-source software is getting serious consideration for companies’ restructuring of their data centers and “cloud computing” initiatives. Red Hat shares this morning are down $1.15, or 2.1%, at $53.86.

And Goldman Sachs‘s James Schneider today raised his rating on shares of flash memory device maker SanDisk (SNDK) to Buy from Hold, with a $45 price target, citing a potential “return to supply/demand balance” by the end of this year for “NAND” flash memory. SanDisk shares are down 26 cents, or 0.7%, at $36.10.