Blackberry 10 is almost on its way, with a launch of January 30th. While BB10 will usher in a new era for RIM, that doesn’t mean the company is planning to jump ship from Blackberry 7 completely.

According to current rumors, RIM will drop prices on existing BB7 handsets considerably after the release of their newest OS. The idea is to continue to position their older OS for emerging markets in Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

This is a similar move to what Microsoft is attempting to do with Windows Phone 7.x in emerging markets and parts of Asia, including an aggressive move on China.

More and more emerging markets are finding interest in smartphones, making it important potential area of growth for Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry.

For those with a current BB7 device, do you plan to move to a Blackberry 10 handset or will you stick with what you already have?

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During a press conference earlier today, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins made the formal announcement that all the current BlackBerry 7 smartphones on the market today will not be eligible for an update to BlackBerry 10 when the new platform launches later this year. In fact, there is going to be very little in terms of connecting BB7 to BB10, since BB7 apps won’t necessarily work with BB10 devices, nor will BB10 apps necessarily work with BB7 devices. They’re two separate ecosystems and two separate platforms.

While Research in Motion has indicated that it will continue to support BlackBerry OS 7.1 for “a while,” it’s only a matter of time before they completely abandon the old OS (which really isn’t that old) and focus their energies exclusively on BlackBerry 10.

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