RIM Apologizes With Free Apps & Technical Support For Three Days Of Downtime

Research In Motion is on a quest for goodwill after last week’s massive outage that left BlackBerry users without service for three days. The company just took to the wires and announced that over a $100 worth of premium apps will eventually be free for a limited time and enterprise users will also net one month of free technical support. RIM hopes SIM 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A. and many more will help calm the nerves those BlackBerry users thinking of jumping ship.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” said RIM’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in a released 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.”

Enterprise users get a little more compensation in the form of free technical support. If the user already pays for the technical support, one month will be tacked onto the end of subscription. Other enterprise users will be offered a one month trial of RIM’s BlackBerry Technical Support Service – Enhanced Support.

The apps will be free start to appear in the BlackBerry App World starting on Wednesday, October 19th and will be available for download until December 31, 2011. More will be released over the next four weeks.

The initial selection includes:

• 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

RIM took a major hit with the latest service interruption and it’s really impossible to tell if free apps will prevent BlackBerry users from defecting to other mobile platforms. Carriers worldwide are compensating BlackBerry users with cash and other offers and it’s not clear if RIM is backing some of those payouts. Users smell blood. Prepare yourself, the class action lawsuits are coming.