RIM’s Post-Outage Peace Offering: Free Apps and a PlayBook
Last week Research In Motion suffered a major meltdown as BlackBerry users from Europe, Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil and Chile experienced a service outage, starting Monday and lasting for three days. RIM explained that the messaging and browsing delays were caused by a core switch failure within their infrastructure.
To appease angry and frustrated patrons, RIM is offering several premium apps for free, which includes 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. Users can start downloading the free apps from October 19 to December 31. At present, the available free apps amount to $100, but during the “free” period, RIM would likely add more apps to the list.
Enterprise customers, on the other hand, will also get one month of free technical support. And those who already subscribed to the service will get an additional month free of charge. Click here to view the full detail of the enterprise offer.
“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.”
Tomorrow will mark the start of BlackBerry DevCon Americas in San Francisco Mariott Marquis. The three-day event will run from October 18-20 and those who opt to register early will get a BlackBerry PlayBook at the event. The event is focused on app developers to entice them to keep making apps for BlackBerry smartphones and upcoming tablets. This event is expected to take RIM out of the deepening hole that they’ve buried themselves into.
“The meeting is important and it’s going to be really difficult for RIM,” said Kevin Burden, an industry analyst with ABI Research. “It’s going to have to get up there and talk about real timelines. You can’t have half-baked products and half-baked plans.”
Conference attendees can download the conference schedule at the BlackBerry App World or here. The BlackBerry DevCon Americas is the first in a series of developer conferences and will be followed by DevCon Asia in Centara Grand at Central World, Bangkok on December 7-8 2011 and the DevCon Europe in Amsterdam RAI Convention Center on February 7-8 2012. The PlayBook is also offered for those who register early for the events in Asia and Europe.
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