RIM Offers Free Apps and Support Following Service Interruptions

Following a series of outages last week that affected BlackBerry users around the word over a three day period, RIM has come forward with its plans to “make good” on the incidents that frustrated millions of users who bashed the mobile technology provider, and rightfully so.

Research In Motion today said it would offer a selection of premium apps worth more than US $100 free of charge to subscribers as “an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions.” 

While this solution may appease some consumers, it’s unlikely to be acceptable and appreciated by enterprises, many of which foot the bills for BlackBerry users, and will not benefit at all from free apps. If anything, giving employees free games and other apps will probably anger IT managers even more, as they can lessen employee productivity.

The company also announced that its enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free Technical Support. Current customers will be offered a complimentary one month extension of their existing Technical Support contract, and customers who do not currently have a Technical Support contract will be offered a one month trial of RIM’s BlackBerry Technical Support Services – Enhanced Support, free of charge. Information on the Enterprise offer is available here.

“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.”

The outages lasted almost three 3 days in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, 1.5 days in Latin America and Canada, and 1 day in the United States. The company finally announced that service levels returned to normal on Thursday, October 13th.

RIM said the apps will be made available to customers over the coming weeks on BlackBerry® App World™ and will be available through the end of this year.

Related Feature: Failure of the BlackBerry PlayBook Means CIOs Need to Plan for an Apple World

Related Reading: Got Android? Some Considerations on Permissions and Security

Related Reading: Mobile Industry Slow to Push Android Updates to Users

Related Content: Mitigation of Security Vulnerabilities on Android & Other Open Handset Platforms

Read More in SecurityWeek’s Mobile & Wireless Security Section