Kari's Corner October 18, 2011

Research In Motion Offers Free Premium Applications

I have written a few times about how the RIM BlackBerry outage interrupted my life as a Saskatoon real estate agent and business owner. Since the outage Reseach In Motion (RIM) announced that it is going to be offering BlackBerry users more than $100 worth of applications for free to try to make up for last week’s issues. RIM has said it will take about 4 weeks for all of the applications to become available through its virtual shop starting Wednesday, October 19th, and you have until the end of the year to take advantage of it. The products offered range from games to communication software.  Below is a list of all of the applications that RIM will be offering and will be available through Blackberry App World.

  • 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 is trying to maintain loyalty of customers who were affected by disruptions last week that affected email, IM and web browsing.  As I mentioned in a previous blog around how the outage impacted the Saskatoon real estate market, it should be an interesting move to see if RIM can maintain their customer base.

As much as I was frustrated and impacted by the global Blackberry outage the other part that affected me was the dropped calls.  Data services such as email and blackberry messenger were interrupted from the outage but I also suffered a significant amount of dropped calls.  From what I have been told from SaskTel this was a combination of both the RIM global outage and the congestion of the 4G network in Saskatoon and the surrounding area.

Have I jumped ship with RIM and the BlackBerry?  Not yet but if RIM continues to have issues I may have to consider a switch.  As a Saskatoon real estate agent I rely very heavily on being able to have dependable technology.  Every technology out there has it’s own unique issues but RIM as a global company has had quite a few in the past few years.  Between RIM and SaskTel 4G issues it has been challenging to have consistent and reliable communication and mobile data services.  I am really hoping that SaskTel gets the planned 4G upgrades in ahead of schedule.  As Saskatoon continues to grow so will the demand for cellular and data services. 

Kari Calder
Saskatoon Real Estate Agent
Century 21 Fusion
kari@saskatoonrealestate.net