BlackBerry Begins Attempt To Make Up

Asking forgiveness and making up is never easy – especially after angering millions of customers on a worldwide scale.

But Research In Motion’ (RIM), the developer of BlackBerry, has begun an attempt to do just that.

After experiencing an international outage which affected as many as 70 million users – some whose service was interrupted for 3 days – RIM is reaching out with gifts of free software and support.

Over $100 of premium apps are being offered to users for free “as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions,” said RIM in an announcement yesterday. The apps will be available through BlackBerry App World within the next few weeks.

Some of the apps which will be available include: SIMS 3 and Bejeweled, from Electronic Arts; N.O.V.A., Texas Hold’em Poker 2, and Bubble Bash 2, from Gameloft;  Photo Editor Ultimate from Ice Cold Apps; DriveSafe.ly Pro, iSpeech Translator Pro, and Drive Safe.ly Enterprise from iSpeech.org; Nobex Radio Premium from Nobex; Shazam Encore from Shazam; and Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant from Vlingo.

The apps will be available for free until the end of this year. They also said that availability will be affected by the type of device a user is using, which OS they are using, access to BlackBerry App World, and local conditions or restrictions.

Enterprise customers will be getting an added apology gift, a free month of technical support. Those who currently have a technical support contract will receive a one month extension to their current contract. Those who are not currently under contract will be offered a free one month trial of enhanced support.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive of BlackBerry, 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.”

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