In a fruity attempt to reconcile with BlackBerry users across the world who suffered service outages last week,Research In Motion is giving away users free access to applications worth $100 for a month. The makers of BlackBerry said customers would be able to download the free applications till the end of the year as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions. The applications on offer will include games like SIMS 3 and Texas Hold em Poker,and photo-editing and speech-translation software,the company said on Monday. RIM will also offer its enterprise customers one month of free technical support. BlackBerry has more than 70 million customers worldwide,and about one million subscribers in India. Mike Lazaridis,chief executive,said,We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again. The outages last week affected e-mail and messaging services on the smartphone across four continents. Indian customers suffered three days of disturbances before the company said on Thursday that it had restored full services. The Canadian company said the outages had taken place after a core-switch failure in its European headquarters in southern England. While the companys goodwill-offer may be happily lapped up by BlackBerry users,its grip on the smartphone market has begun to loosen. Kunal Bajaj,who heads the Indian office of consultancy AnalysysMason,said BlackBerrys troubles had begun well before last weeks glitch. Reliance In Motion released fewer products last year,he said,leaving it vulnerable to aggressive rivals such as Samsung and Apple Inc. Samsungs Galaxy Tab series of smartphones and Apples iPhone line have been the best sellers this year so far. [In this market once youve lost the pulse,its hard to get it back, Bajaj said.
