BlackBerry Outage Victims Offered Apps Not Cash

RIM has announced its compensation package for BlackBerry users affected by last week's outage, and if you were hoping for a refund then you're going to be disappointed. Instead, RIM is offering a bundle of twelve apps – usually collectively priced at over $100 from the BlackBerry App World – free, including titles such as SIMS 3 and Vlingo Plus, while enterprise customers will also get a month's free Technical Support.

If enterprise users already have a Technical Support contract, they'll find an extra month's service tacked onto the end of it. Those without will be offered a standalone free month of the enhanced services, with no obligation to continue.

Everyone else will have to wait for RIM to begin to roll out the free apps, which the company says will happen "over the coming weeks" and run until the end of the year. "We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience," RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said in a statement. "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 that will satisfy angry users – or indeed prevent them from jumping ship to Android or iOS – remains to be seen. Analysts estimated the outage – which lasted up to three days, and was blamed on a fault in both server and backup-server systems – may well cost RIM over $100m.

Compensation Apps: