BlackBerry services outage: RIM makes applications freely available

To help users forget the three days where BlackBerry services were interrupted last week, RIM has made commercial mobile applications freely available on their BlackBerry App World portal.

Last week was challenging for the Canadian Smartphone manufacturer with a large outage to their services dragging on for three days, silencing BlackBerry Smartphones at exactly the time that Apple was in the spotlight with the launch of their iOS 5 platform, their iCloud online storage service and their iPhone 4S Smartphone.

The breadth of the disruption, affecting multiple continents, was unprecedented, with the fault being a problem with a switch at the heart of the network going down and a backup solution not working. One of RIM’s managers, Mike Lazaridis, apologised on a video post for the disruption, while exasperated users comments and jokes multiplied on social networks.

While the manufacturer can hope that their clients will remain loyal, used to BlackBerry’s communication services, the outage arrived at a poor time as the company is continually trying to reassure the markets of their relevancy in face of quickly growing competition.


Mobile applications offered
To try and seek forgiveness for this incident, which could cost up to 100 million dollars, Research in Motion has announced an initiative of freely offering a range of commercial mobile applications via their BlackBerry App World portal.

From the 19th of October until the 31st of December 2011, it will be possible to download the following apparitions for free:

• SIMS 3 (EA)
• Bejeweled (EA)
• NOVA (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)
• DriveSafe.ly Enterprise (iSpeech.org)
• Nobex Radio Premium (Nobex)
• Shazam Encore (Shazam)
• Vlingo Plus : Virtual Assistant (Vlingo)

RIM also plans on offering their enterprise clients a free month of technical support, in the form of a contract extension or a free trial for those that don’t have a contract. The company has also promised to take immediate precautions to event such an incident from reoccurring.