RIM continues to try users’ patience

Rating: Two weeks and only two crappy apps!

When RIM suffered its three day outage, RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, said, “We have apologised to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence.” This doesn’t seem to be working. He also said, “We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience.” Part of that gratitude was to offer RIM’s enterprise customers a month of free technical support. Details are available here. Consumers, on the other hand, were offered twelve free apps. RIM promised, “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 [2011]. Ten days later and only two apps (one a game) have been made available. * (See update below). This has led to considerable discontent amongst BlackBerry owners. One GoMo News reader wrote here, “Two weeks and only two crappy apps! What a sincere apology, BB!” Here we explain how to get the free apps if your BlackBerry won’t show them.RIM itself didn’t say so, but Virgin Mobile pointed out here that in order to receive these free apps, BlackBerry owners need to have at least version 3 of the App World app installed.

Virgin Mobile also provided details of how to download the App World app if it isn’t pre-loaded.

Basically you have to visit http://mobile.blackberry.com. [Note: Virgin left the two forward slashes out in the visual version of the URL.]

If you fire up the App World app; can’t see the free apps; and the handset doesn’t notify you of an available upgrade for the App World app, then you need to check which version is installed.

Go to ‘Options’ on the handset; select ‘Applications’; and then – in the top right hand corner – ensure that the ‘Add-on’ list is being displayed.

That should give you the version number for the BlackBerry App World app. We, however, encountered a BlackBerry Curve on the T-Mobile network which was stuck at version 2.4.

Efforts to upgrade from the handset failed. So we fired up the BlackBerry Desktop Software and connected the handset via USB.

Next visit this specific URL – but before doing so make sure to use the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. The facility requires ActiveX and so won’t work with Firefox, etc.

The URL is http://mobileapps.blackberry.com/devicesoftware/entry.do?code=appworld#content-start. If you follow the instructions, the latest version of the App World app will install.

Theoretically, you should now see an icon marked ‘Thank You’ and the two free apps are hidden behind that.

If not, go to ‘Categories’ and then select Applications. Right at the top there’s a category called ‘Thank You Gift’. The free apps are there.

* UPDATE: Just after we published this article a third app appeared. It’s another game. This time it’s Bejeweled from Electronic Arts.