Last week, the BlackBerry Internet Services went down and suffered a serious outage spanning 3 or 4 days, affecting users in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa.
These users were without email usage, internet browsing and, perhaps most importantly, BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) for three days. We’ve spoken to customers who were left frustrated and feeling let down, after paying extra on their monthly tariff for the service.
Many are hoping for some form of compensation for the outage, and it would seem now that Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry brand, have come up with a package for customers in an attempt to make up for the service failure.
If you were hoping for a refund of your phone bill or even some of it, then you may be disappointed. Those who are happy to receive free stuff, however, will most likely be happy with the offering.
RIM is offering customers a bundle of premium apps to download completely free from the BlackBerry App World – and we have to say, there are some decent titles in there. The package is worth around £100 if bought normally from the store, and includes games such as The SIMS 3 and the awesome voice control app, Vlingo Plus.
The full list of free apps is as follows:
- 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
Those who subscribe to BES, or BlackBerry Enterprise Server (Business), will find they get a free month of technical support added on to their package as well as the free apps.
The free apps bundle will start to become available worldwide over the next few weeks, and will run until the end of the year, so you can ensure you’ll be able to get yours at some point without having to rush.
Though the service outage only lasted around 3 days, analysts already anticipate that it could cost the company well in excess of $100 million, not to mention lost customers who may have migrated to another platform such as Android or iPhone.
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