RIM offers free apps and games as consolation for service outages

By Jeffrey Van Camp Published October 17, 2011

blackberry-os7-handsets-august-2011 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Angry at RIM for your lack of BlackBerry service for several days, to a week? There’s an app for that. Or, a bunch of apps, actually. Today, RIM announced that a “selection of premium apps worth a total value of more than $100” will be free to download for its customers over the coming weeks in its BlackBerry App World store. If you’re a BB user, the apps will become available starting Oct. 19, though some may not be available until Nov. 19. You’ll have until Dec. 31 to download them.

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

Here are the apps available:

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

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RIM states that more apps will also be available and enterprise customers will get a month of free support for all of their troubles. Regular customers will get a free 1 month extension on their Technical Support contract or a free one-month trial of the the support program, if they aren’t currently onboard.

All of this, is due to cascading outages around the world that left users in Europe, India, Africa, the Middle East, and North America without BlackBerry services like BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), App World, and email for several days. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis apologized to users in a YouTube video last week.

If you’re a BB user, does a copy of the Sims 3 make you feel better?

Update 9:45am: Updated the availability.

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Jeffrey Van Camp

Former Digital Trends Contributor

As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…

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