In a bid to appease BlackBerry subscribers irked by the major service outages last week, Research in Motion (RIM) has offered them a selection of premium apps worth more than $100 for free. RIM will also be offering one month of free support to its enterprise subscribers to compensate the possible loss during the service collapse. The Canadian firm says the free apps will be available through BlackBerry App World until December 31,2011.
[RELATED_ARTICLE]
“Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70 million customers,” says RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. “We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers. We’ve worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years, and we’re committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future.”
The subscribers can access the complete selection of the premium apps from October 19. The selection of apps include SIMS 3, N.O.V.A., Bubble Bash 2, Photo Editor Ultimate, Vlingo Plus, e.t.c. RIM, however, also points out that the availability of this offer would depend on the type of device, operating system version, access to BlackBerry App World and local conditions and/or restrictions.
“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” adds Lazaridis. “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’s free apps offer comes days after millions of BlackBerry users across the world including India suffered from what RIM dubbed as the “switching failure in its private network”. The service collapse continued for three days, irking the BlackBerry users worldwide. Read our previous coverage on the BlackBerry service collapse here.
It’s being said that RIM’s BlackBerry outages have come at the worst possible time as the Canadian company is locked into a stiff competition with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. According to figures and multiple reports, RIM has continued to trail behind Apple and Google. The instant messaging and e-mail services are the prominent factors behind popularity of the BlackBerry devices and that an infrastructure glitch involving its messaging and e-mail services is certainly not going to help the company much.
Also read,