Virgin Media is offering customers a £12 per month deal on the BlackBerry Curve 8520.

Yes, you did read that right. While the BlackBerry has traditionally been seen as the smartphone for the business person, Virgin has decided to mass market this particular handset.

Jonathan Kini, director of mobile at Virgin Media said: “BlackBerry is no longer just for business users, and our exceptionally competitive deals can only help BlackBerry smartphones become an even bigger break-through device for consumers.

“Popular with families, students and teens loving its class-leading email, social networking and instant messaging features, our new unbeatable deal slashes the cost of this fantastic phone for anyone looking to stay connected.”

For £12, Virgin is giving 50 inclusive minutes and 250 texts per month as well as unlimited BlackBerry Messenger and unlimited web and email access. Also included are up to ten email accounts plus an option to link to Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail.

The BlackBerry Curve 8520 is now a year old, so it is rather surprising that Virgin Media has gone down this route.

That said, it is generally thought to be a very good handset featuring a full QWERTY keyboard, a 2 megapixel camera, expandable memory of up to 32GB. Also available is access to BlackBerry Applications World, where there are a variety of tools and social networking facilities. This latter includes Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Experts also reckon that it a good entry phone until the new version of the operating system is launched.