BlackBerry users get $100 worth of apps following outage

[Jos]

BlackBerry users across the world were hit with a massive outage last week that left them unable to send emails, browse the web or use BlackBerry Messenger for up to three days. Now that service has been restored, Research in Motion is making amends by offering its users over $100 in premium applications.

The offer will be available through the end of the year and includes a selection of entertainment and productivity apps such as The Sims 3, iSpeech Translator Pro, Shazam Encore, and Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant, among others. The company is also offering one month of free technical support to enterprise users. RIM says this is a token of its appreciation for customer patience:

"We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience," RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said in a statement today. "We have apologized 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."

Whether or not free applications will be enough to appease angry users looking at other platforms after the outage remains to be seen. At the very least it will bring some awareness to the company's application store, which has around 40,000 apps available and has seen around 1 billion downloads so far -- some way behind Apple's App Store.

RIM has not released complete information on what caused the outages, but they did say that a problem with system hardware caused a backlog of data to build up in the company's European servers. The company's backup systems also failed, resulting in a cascading failure that spread across the world. RIM’s chief technology officer for software, David Yach, is reportedly leading an audit to discover the root cause of disruption.

Check out the company’s press release for more information and an expanded list of included apps.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/45882-blackberry-users-get-100-worth-of-apps-following-outage.html

 

[TomSEA]

Won't make any difference. Blackberry will be dead in 5 years or less. They are getting slaughtered in the cell phone market right now as people much prefer iPhone and Android type devices.

 

[lawfer]

$100? Even if I buy all the apps on the App World, I would still have money to spare.

Please Blackberry, just step out now that you have a chance to leave with some dignity.

 

[Burty117]

Agreed with both of you. Leave while you can without going bankrupt first. Save the Bank lending you money to carry on when you could end all the pain right now...

 

[Guest]

I just got rid of my crapberry and got a nice new iphone 4s. Wow so this is how a phone is actually suppose to work..So refreshing..Sorry RIM but I agree with the other comments. Sell or get out while you can. You have nothing to offer anymore. You will slowly lose your core customers till there is nothing left.

 

[Guest]

Blackberry will be the leader one day , I don't mind waiting till they're there I dnt how someone having a blackberry can imagine a day without one . I know the outage was hard on everyone but just remember life goes on and to live in the past will keep you behind . Blackberry BLACK BERRY THE FUTURE

 

[nazartp]

Honestly, don't know why people harp on BlackBerry. I am a business user of the device and I am so far yet to see a phone with better keyboard and better native e-mail client. My firm now allows to order iPhone and Android phones. I am yet to see a single employee in our team of about 200 who likes those better for business use.

 

[Recipe7]

nazartp said:
Honestly, don't know why people harp on BlackBerry. I am a business user of the device and I am so far yet to see a phone with better keyboard and better native e-mail client. My firm now allows to order iPhone and Android phones. I am yet to see a single employee in our team of about 200 who likes those better for business use.

I know how you feel.

It is strictly a business phone today. Kids and socialites can stick with their androids and iphones.

 

[stewi0001]

This is irony for me, since they are starting this on Wednesday and I'm due for a new phone on Thursday and I'm planning on getting a droid. Oh well...

 

[lawfer]

nazartp said:
Honestly, don't know why people harp on BlackBerry. I am a business user of the device and I am so far yet to see a phone with better keyboard and better native e-mail client. My firm now allows to order iPhone and Android phones. I am yet to see a single employee in our team of about 200 who likes those better for business use.

I don't see how BB is any better than iPhone or Windows Phone 7 as far as e-mail goes. Both platforms support business e-mail just as well.

Truth is, you are just used to Blackberry, and there's nothing wrong with that. But sadly, what Blackberry was known for as being the best, has progressively become standard on other platforms.

 

[aj_the_kidd]

Yeah BB use to be this business phone juggernaut that had little competition and every business man/woman and their dog had one. Now its seen by many (mainly us kids and socialites) as old, not necessarily bad just old and outdated, but i guess we don't know any better.

BTW i have owned a BB before and after owning a iPhone and Android phone before that i was a little disappointed and not overly impressed by the email functionality, but that's just me.

 

[Guest]

I enjoy my blackberry! I've used iphone and droid and still prefer my bb! I think people rely toomuch on technology!

 

[Guest]

i too am i long term BB user, and a manager for my company. yes the iPhone and Android systems may appear to be better, but they are really just a consumer device, covering a broad spectrum of age groups and needs, they however do not fit very well into business life. we BES users only had a few hours outage during the day, and I hardly even noticed. Most of the outage affected consumer users, not business from what I have read

the Blackberry system has the option of using a central control server (BES) to setup and control the all volumes of handsets, configs, firmware, applications etc. It's completely secure & encrypted and if handsets are lost or stolen, in a few clicks I have rendered the handset useless. I don't need to use a product that was never intended to run on Windows (and when it does, its uses a lot of resources) to push out an app to all handsets.

until the other 'fruity based' product catch up to offer a centralised system for IT folk to configure & deploy large numbers of handsets, have it completely secure and stop restricting us with their poor iTunes software needed to run/access anything with iOS, then i'm quite happy to use Blackberry for some time to come.

 

[Guest]

nothing more time consuming and soul destroying than setting up senior execs iOS devices on a Windows network, manually to get them on wi-fi, (has to be wireless N), reserve IP address, connected to iTunes (when it feels like working) load dozens of apps and then opening up firewall ports/settings. then rinse and repeat for X numbers of execs.

meantime you need to do your other tasks/duties at the same time. come on RIM get the Playbook software updated, and start making more of an effort.

 

[aj_the_kidd]

Guest said:
I think people rely toomuch on technology!

Its funny that a BB user made this statement especially when they are often referred to as "crackberries". I don't mean this in bad way its just BB users are generally very reliant on technology and to hear a BB user say people rely on it too much, is amusing.