BlackBerry maker Research in Motion – RIM – has announced freebies worth $100 equivalent to approx. Rs. 5000/- in a bid to appease and compensate BlackBerry users who had faced service disruption last week.
BlackBerry has over seven crores customers worldwide and over 10 lakh users in India. Last week, BlackBerry’s e-mail, messenger and other online services were disrupted for three days due to core switch failure. RIM claimed on early Tuesday that it had fixed the problem and services restored. However, within a few hours the services collapsed again in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, causing hardships to the users. The services were restored only on Thursday in most parts of the world and a day later in India.
[BlackBerry free apps will be made available over the coming weeks and will continue to be available till December 31, 2011.
RIM will offer free technical support to its Blackberry customers for a month. Customers, who do not have a contract now, will be offered a free one-month trial of its technical support services.
RIM will offer 12 mobile applications including Vlingo, which combines voice-t0-text and voice recognition technology, Gameloft and iSpeech– a free text-to-speech and speech recognition software. The applications will be made available to BlackBerry subscribers on BlackBerry App World, the company said in a statement.
Industry sources said stiff competition, which BlackBerry faces from Apple and other smartphone suppliers like Nokia,Samsung, HTC, Dell among others in India and globally, may have driven RIM to appease its customers. Analysts said the firm faces a wider problem from the damage to its reputation and loss of corporate customers who no longer think they can rely on the device.
RIM has taken right step by apologising to its loyal customers and offered them freebies to win back their confidence. Hope, in future RIM will not give any opportunity to its valued customers to feel frustrated.
