BlackBerry Launches Camera-Less Phone for Singapore’s Military Service Youngsters

Singapore’s military service for its young men generally lasts around two years, and it places some stresses on those who takes part. One of those being that their smartphones are effectively banned from being inside any army installations in the island-state. Rather than see youngsters go phone-less, RIM (NASDAQ:RIMM) has just launched a camera-less version of its BlackBerry Curve 9360 (pictured below) for this very specific market in Singapore.

All that has changed in the new model is that the 5-megapixel camera on the original Curve 9360 has been physically removed so that no sensitive military secrets can be conveyed by videos or images. This means it can be used pretty much freely within any bases with the blessing of Singapore’s Ministry of Defence. The same thing happened earlier this year with the iPhone 4S as sold by local operator M1.

BlackBerry is marketing the non-seeing Curve model with the tagline “National Service doesn’t mean no social life” (as pictured above) to emphasize that the military draft doesn’t have to mean a two-year void in your virtual and real social lives. So all the other features, like apps and BBM, are intact. It just means that there’ll be no Instagramming of top-secret military drones from your phone. Oh, wait, there’s no Instagram on BlackBerry OS 7 anyway. No Bibbycamming then.

UPDATE: Added image from RIM of the camera-less Curve 9360 phone.