BlackBerry offers users $100 in free apps

NEW YORK - Disgruntled BlackBerry users take heart — you can choose among $100 worth of free apps to soothe your raw nerves following last week’s service outage.

Hey, it’s something.

With users still irate about last week’s service outages, which left tens of millions of Blackberry users without their e-mail or instant messaging service for up to three days, BlackBerry parent Research In Motion kicked off its three-day developer’s conference (or DevCon 2011) Tuesday.

The company’s main priority was to introduce its new operating system, BBX. Another key portion of the agenda: to say, in effect, “Hey, sorry about last week, but we did the best we could.”

Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research-in-Motion (RIM), took the stage to reveal the new software, which will be available both on smartphones and RIM’s tablet, the PlayBook OS 2.0.

He also reiterated the company’s contrition regarding last week’s outages, which impacted BlackBerry users everywhere from India to Canada.

“The worldwide outages we experienced this week were unfortunate,” Laziridis said.

“We restored full services as quickly as we could. Now we’re working on root cause analysis and we’re focused on making this right for BB users around the world.”

In a further attempt to appease its clientele, BlackBerry also announced Monday it would be offering customers $100 worth of free apps.

The outages were another setback in a prolonged stretch of turmoil for the company. Its financial performance has disappointed as its share of the smartphone market has declined. That slide may only continue given the current sales of the iPhone 4S, which debuted the Friday after the outages.

RIM has also struggled to penetrate the tablet market, which will soon get more crowded with the entry of Amazon’s Kindle Fire.