/ 17 October 2011

Sorry about the BIS, here’s free apps, says BlackBerry

Canada based Research In Motion (RIM), the company behind BlackBerry, will offer free premium apps to customers as a form of compensation for its service interruptions and outage last week, the group said on Monday.

It said that a selection of premium apps worth a total value of more than $100 would be offered free of charge to subscribers “as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions”.

The apps would be made available to customers over the coming weeks on BlackBerry App World and would continue to be available until December 31.

“Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70-million customers,” said RIM co-chief executive 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 complete selection of premium apps would become available to download at BlackBerry App World over a period of four weeks beginning on Wednesday, October 19. The selections over this period would include the following:

  • SIMS 3 — Electronic Arts
  • Bejeweled — Electronic Arts
  • NOVA — 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(tm) Premium — Nobex
  • Shazam Encore — Shazam
  • Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant — Vlingo

RIM’s enterprise customers would also be offered one month of free technical support. Current customers would be offered a complimentary one month extension of their existing technical support contract, and customers who did not currently have a technical support contract would be offered a free one month trial of RIM’s BlackBerry technical support services.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” added Lazaridis. “We have apologised 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.”

Last week, many customers experienced service interruptions and delays over a period of approximately three days in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, one and a half days in Latin America and Canada, and one day in the United States. Global teams worked around the clock to contain the issue and minimise the impact to customers as much as possible. Service levels returned to normal as of Thursday October 13,, RIM said. — I-Net Bridge