Majority of Blackberry users experienced loss of service, or partial disruption in service in the first half of October. On October 13th RIM announced that they restored full service functionality and cleared the backlog from previous days. Loss of service manifested in various ways. Sometimes users just couldn't open attachements (from gmail for example), at other times no new emails arrived for many hours, or even the functional email account stopped working completely (and needed an re-configuration throught web interface mobileemail)…

Free Apps as an apology

As a compensation for all the trouble, RIM decided to offer dosen of premium applications for free. List of these premium apps include the following:

• SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
• Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
• N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
• Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
• Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
• Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
• DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
• iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
• Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
• Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
• Shazam Encore – Shazam
• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

RIM started offering these free downloads through AppWorld. Downloads will be available till end of year. Happy downloading.

RIM's share dwinedling

Service outage came at the worst time for RIM, as Apple just launched new iPhone 4S smart phone a few days prior. Latest numbers (source millenium mobile ad service platform) show that RIM lost some percentage points again.

Android now owns more than half of smartphone user base, with Apple strong second. RIM's part is shrinking for last 2 years, and is fast closing the other ramaining platforms in the chart… Sincere apology of RIM's founder and president Mike Lazarus was nice, but what RIM needs to show is QNX based smartphone, that will keep all strong points of blackberry phone, and be able to run Android apps (as Blackberry App World is being deserted by developers)… Would you buy such a phone? Sorry - not this year…