Three-day service outage accelerates RIM death spiral, company responds by offering free download of Bubble Bash 2

Research in Motion is rolling out a suite of free apps to pacify users incensed by last week’s global service outage. The full list will be revealed over time, but it includes several games and translation apps, a photo editor, text-to-speech programs, a radio app, Shazam Encore and a Siri-like virtual assistant, Vlingo. Enterprise customers—who probably shouldn’t spend all day on Bejeweled—are being offered a month of free tech support. Call us optimistic, but we expected something more ambitious after a costly and humiliating global fiasco. The stakes were already high (the company’s shares lost half their value this year), so RIM should be in crisis mode—but thus far, the response has been pretty pathetic. Read the entire story [The Globe and Mail] »