In the wake of a massive three-day outage that left customers around the world without access to BlackBerry services, Research in Motion said Monday that it would offer several premium apps at no charge.
The apps will be available for download from October 19 to December 31. RIM is starting with a dozen apps worth approximately $100, though more will be added.
The apps include: SIMS 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A., Texas Hold'em Poker 2, Bubble Bash 2, Photo Editor Ultimate, DriveSafe.ly Pro, iSpeech Translator Pro, Drive Safe.ly Enterprise, Nobex Radio Premium, Shazam Encore, and Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant.
Enterprise customers, meanwhile, will get one free month of technical support. Those who already subscribe to the service will get an additional month added to their contracts at no charge. More details will be available at www.blackberry.com/enterpriseoffer.
"We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience," RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said in a statement. "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."
BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina started experiencing email and message delays, as well as complete outages, last Monday, a problem that later spread to North America. RIM later said the ongoing problems were caused by a core switch failure inside its network and was not the result of a hack.
That hardware failure prompted a "ripple effect" in RIM's systems, Lazaridis said during a conference call with reporters last week, meaning messages were backlogged in RIM's servers. Getting things back up "took much longer than we had expected," he said. Service was restored by Thursday, but in the end, the outage was the biggest that RIM had ever experienced.
If you were affected, does the free apps offer make things better? Would you prefer a refund? Are you dropping BlackBerry because of the outage? Let us know in the comments.