BlackBerry will a offer free mobile application worth more than $100 (nearly Rs 4,870) to its subscribers as an expression of appreciation for their "patience" during recent service disruptions.
The applications will be made available to customers over a period of four weeks, beginning October 19, on BlackBerry Application World and will continue to be available until December 31, 2011, Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry smartphones, 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.
"We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers. We've worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years and we're committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future," RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said.
Last week, BlackBerry's e-mail, messenger and other online services were disrupted for three days on account of a core switch failure. BlackBerry has more than 70 million customers worldwide.
"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.