RIM to Offer Free Apps to BlackBerry Users as an Apology for Last Week's Outage

RIM has announced its plan to offer subscribers more than $100 worth of new BlackBerry games and utilities as an expression of its appreciation for their patience during the service outage that plagued users for almost three days last week. 

The company promised the free applications will be available to download over a four-week period, beginning Wednesday. RIM also said that its corporate customers will be offered one month of free technical support. RIM will offer the following apps for free, with more to come, according to the BlackBerry maker:

• 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

The apps will continue to be available until Dec. 31, 2011. While it’s too early to assess the financial impact of the outage, the service disruption was the worst the company has suffered, failing to deliver email, instant messaging and browsing to customers worldwide. Since the issue first surfaced, RIM worked quickly to restore service and currently promises a fully functional network. 

Though thousands of subscribers were left in the dark when it came to instant access on their BlackBerries, it appears the outage had a silver lining after all. According to a recent report, the number of reported traffic accidents in Dubai and Abu Dhabi plunged by 20% and 40%, respectfully, during the service disruption.