While there's almost no chance we'd recommend you purchase it, RIM and Verizon have seen it fit to introduce a "new" BlackBerry model — the BlackBerry Curve 9310 will launch on July 12th for $49.99 (after a $50 mail-in rebate and with the requisite new two-year contract). The phone itself was recently introduced on Boost Mobile and is simply a variant on a device that RIM launched way back in 2010. It'll run BlackBerry 7.1 and include a 3.2-megapixel camera. It'll be a modest upgrade over the currently-available Curve 9330, which only has a 2-megapixel camera and runs BlackBerry 6.

Verizon appears to be positioning it as a way for first-time smartphones buyers to move up from feature phones, but there's a number of inexpensive Android options (or the $99 iPhone 4) that would likely be a lot more useful to potential buyers. With the Curve 9370 already available on Verizon, we don't really see the need for this phone to exist — Verizon and RIM might be better off simply cutting the price of its available BlackBerry options.