Research In Motion today announced that it will offer its BlackBerry subscribers free applications as compensation for last week’s service interruption. While the outage lasted about a day in the US and a day and a half in Canada, customers in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa experienced service interruptions and delays for up to three days. RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said
“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience. We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”
RIM will offer each BlackBerry subscriber more than US$100 in premium apps through the BlackBerry App World. Among the apps that will be offered are the following (more are promised):
- SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
- Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
- N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
- Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
- Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
- Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
- DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
- iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
- Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
- Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
- Shazam Encore – Shazam
- Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo
RIM’s enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free Technical Support, either as an extension to their current contracts or as a trial of RIM’s BlackBerry Technical Support Services – Enhanced Support if not currently signed up.
Apps will be available Wednesday, October 19th and will continue to be available until December 31st, 2011.