BlackBerry maker Research In Motion will offer free mobile applications worth over USD 100 as well as technical support to every enterprise customer, as a token of appreciation for subscribers' "patience" during its service disruptions last week.
The applications will be made available to customers over a period of four weeks, beginning October 19, on BlackBerry Application World. These will available until December 31, this year, Research In Motion (RIM) said in a statement today.
BlackBerry will offer 12 mobile applications, including Vlingo, which combines voice-to-text and voice recognition technology, Gameloft, and iSpeech, a free text-to-speech and speech recognition software.
This tweet is how BlackBerry told it's customers they were getting the free apps: #DearTeamBlackBerry #thankyou for your trust and loyalty. We want to show you some love
"We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers. We have worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years and we are committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future," RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said.
RIM will also offer its enterprise customers one month of free technical support. Existing technical support contracts will be extended by one month while customers who do not have a contract will be offered a one month trial of technical support services free of charge.
Last week, BlackBerry's e-mail, messenger and other online services were disrupted for three days due to core switch failure.
BlackBerry has more than 70 million customers worldwide. It has about one million subscribers in India. "We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience. We have apologised to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again," Lazaridis added.