(image source: Boy Genius Report)

BY: EVAN THOMAS

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Research in Motion has a peace offering for its customers. You know, the ones who dealt with three days without service last week. CNET has the rundown.

“Research in Motion is giving away $100 worth of app downloads to customers to say sorry for last week’s service outages. Starting Wednesday, free apps will be rolled out over four weeks and will be available for download until the end of the year.... In addition, enterprise customers get a free month of technical support.”

Free for customers -- means costly for RIM. The Register wonders if all that money could be better used to, say, prevent network outages.

“But it will be expensive ... A month's free support will cost a bit too, money which can't be spent ensuring that such a thing never happens again, but hopefully the customers will be too busy playing Texas Hold ’em Poker 2 to notice, next time.”

Almost everyone acknowledges, this is a gamble. Techcrunch says RIM had better brace itself-- users who stay with RIM are probably going to remain angry.

“RIM took a major hit with the latest service interruption and it’s really impossible to tell if free apps will prevent BlackBerry users from defecting to other mobile platforms.Users smell blood. Prepare yourself, the class action lawsuits are coming.”

And in some cases, the damage has already been done. One consumer -- CIO Don Jaycox at law firm DLA Piper LLP tells Bloomberg his firm’s trust in RIM has been shaken.

“I wouldn’t say it’s broken but it’s certainly damaged.... We’ve been moving down the road to supporting multiple devices- iPhones and Androids-- for a while, and this has really brought this to the front burner.... Up until this point we’ve heavily favored Blackberry, but that will probably not be the case in the future.”

The outage and recovery were all exceedingly poor timing for RIM. Its developer’s conference kicks off today in San Francisco.