Research In Motion (RIM) has announced that a selection of premium apps worth more than $100 (R787) will be offered free of charge to subscribers as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions.

 

The apps will be made available to customers over the coming weeks on BlackBerry App World, and will continue to be available until 31 December 2011. The apps, which will be available from 19^th October, will include:

The company added that this is an initial selection, and that a complete selection of premium apps will be made available to download at BlackBerry App World over the next four weeks. Additionally, RIM added that its enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free technical support, and current customers will be offered a complimentary one month extension of their existing technical support contract.

Customers who do not currently have a technical support contract will be offered a one month trial of BlackBerry Technical Support Services - Enhanced Support, free of charge.  Additional details about the program and information about how to register will be available here.  

In a statement, RIM co-chief executive officer Mike Lazaridis explained that the company had worked hard to earn the trust of its 70 million customers globally over the past twelve years, and affirmed that it is “committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future”.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” added Lazaridis. “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.”

The mea culpa offering comes in the wake of last week’s series of outages that left BlackBerry users fuming as they were unable to send or receive messages and unable to browse the internet. In recent news, local mobile operators offered a silver lining to RIM’s dark cloud when they announced that they would reimburse their BlackBerry customers who had been affected.