While Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM, has already publicly apologized for last week’s three-day BlackBerry outage, the PR guys figured that that probably wasn’t enough. Which is why they’ve announced that they’re offering BlackBerry customers a bunch of free “premium apps,” in the hopes of winning back some love. Check the app list after the jump.

From the RIM press release given earlier today at Waterloo, Ontario:

The complete selection of premium apps will become available to download at BlackBerry App World over a period of four weeks beginning Wednesday, October 19th. The selections over this period will include the following (with more to come):

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

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

*Please note that the availability of this offer will depend on the type of device, operating system version, access to BlackBerry App World and local conditions and/or restrictions.

The 12 apps are collectively valued at around R800, so that’s nice. Reports suggest that more should be added later on – although whether or not this is going to make any real difference to the customers looking to jump ship remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen whether or not RIM can afford to be making cutesy gestures like this; analysts figure they lost about $100 million over the course of the three-day outage.

It sure must’ve been hard to have to rely on text messaging, whatsapp, email and Facebook to communicate for three whole days.

[Source: Engadget]