BlackBerry maker hangs head, extends bouquet of flowers

In an attempt to make more concrete its apology for last week’s disastrous service outage, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion this morning is offering users a dozen free applications and enterprise customers a month’s worth of free technical support.

(UAE police: BlackBerry outage made driving safer.)

The applications include:

• 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^TM Premium – Nobex
• Shazam Encore – Shazam
• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

From a company press release:

RIM’s enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free Technical Support.  Current customers will be offered a complimentary one month extension of their existing Technical Support contract, and customers who do not currently have a Technical Support contract will be offered a one month trial of RIM’s BlackBerry Technical Support Services – Enhanced Support, free of charge.  Additional details about the program and information about how to register will be available at www.blackberry.com/enterpriseoffer.

As might be expected, not everyone is seeing the gesture in an entirely positive light.  Harry McCracken writes at Technologizer:

As I read that list, I suffer from pangs of cognitive dissonance. Corporate E-mail is important stuff, and delivering it reliably is utterly core to RIM’s mission and reputation. Free poker games feel like an off-topic way of making up for an e-mail outage. What would be more appropriate? Well, how about cash?

Cash would be a good start, all right.

But I’m guessing a fair number of BlackBerry users are going to download the Hold-em app while they wait for RIM to sweeten the pot.

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