The outages that affected the online services of Blackberry phone users were a big black eye for Blackberry"s owners Research in Motion. Today the company announced plans to offer a number of Blackberry apps and games available as free downloads as compensation for the downtime that affect some customers for as much as three days. The free apps will be made available via BlackBerry App World starting on Wednesday with new free apps released over the next four weeks. The apps will continue to be free to download until December 31.
The list of free apps and games includes the following with RIM promising even more will be revealed later:
• 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
In addition to the free app downloads, Blackberry enterprise users will get one month of free technical support. Users who already have a technical support contract will automatically get a one month extension for free while users without such a contract will be offered a one month free trial of Blackberry tech support.
Blackberry users around the world suffered through an outage of its online service last week which affected the email, text messaging and web browser features of the smartphone. Full service was restored by Thursday. 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."