RIM Offers Free Apps To Say Sorry For BlackBerry Service Outage

To make up for the worldwide systems failure of 10 October that left millions of its customers in the lurch for several days, BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion has promised a new, more stable platform—and £100 of free apps to say sorry.

The apps are already available for download and most of them are what we'd call fun apps, including games like the Sims and a photo editor.  Users can get them free of charge until the end of the year from the BlackBerry App World store.  Business customers, who don't necessarily need the free games, can choose from a month of free tech support or an extension of their existing contract.

Alongside this symbolic gesture, RIM has also promised that it will do everything possible to ensure that it will never happen again.  Christophe Lefort, director of RIM France explained that the 'overall availability rate for the past 18 months has been 99.97%,' before confirming that the access problems didn't involve any kind of security breach, saying that users' privacy is 'part of the company's DNA.'

Number crunching

Some analysts believe the outage could cost RIM anywhere between 50 and 100 million dollars.  That's definitely something the Canadian company could do without.  Although its user base has recently grown, turnover figures are down 15%.

New approach

The DevCon Americas conference, which finished yesterday in San Francisco, gave RIM a chance to show off a lot of new projects, including BBX, its plan to merge its BlackBerry smartphone OS and the QNX platform used on its PlayBook tablet.  It promises developers faster, more sophisticated apps for both types of device.  'BBX is a single unified platform for the entire world — phones, tablets, and millions of inventive devices we use every day of our lives,' said QNX chief executive Dan Dodge.  The company is hoping that this new approach will help it regain some of the ground lost in recent months.

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