Safaricom Rewards All its BlackBerry Clients with Free One Week Service

Safaricom is rewarding all the Subscribers to Safaricom’s Blackberry seven days of free subscription following last week’s three-day outage.

The bonus subscription takes effect from this Saturday 22nd at 0000HRS till Saturday 29th mid-night. The outage affected the over 13,000 BlackBerry users on Safaricom. The affected users on Safaricom network will access data and mail services free of charge.

Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore, noted that the timing of the offer towards the end of the month was deliberate. Apparently this is the time when there is normally heavy use of the BlackBerry service and the Safaricom wanted its customers to save as much as possible from the offer.

The free one week subscription offer from Safaricom means that the customers will not be billed for the service during the last week of October. During the outage last week, Blackberry users experienced difficulties in accessing their e-mail accounts, instant messaging  and browsing the internet.

Research In Motion (RIM) announced yesterday that it will offer a selection of premium apps worth a total value of more than US $100 for FREE to subscribers as an expression of gratitude for their patience during the recent outage. The premium apps to be offered free will be made available to clientss over the next few weeks on BlackBerry App World. The apps will be available until December 31, 2011, subject to terms and conditions.

The complete selection of premium apps to be offered for free will be available for download at BlackBerry App World over a period of one month starting Wednesday, October 19th.  Some of the apps to be offered for free are below with more to follow.

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

Most affected by the unprecedented Blackberry service interruption were users in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Southern Asia, before it spread later to other parts of the world.

There are over 70 million BlackBerry users across over 500 networks spread in 91 countries across the world.