Amid all the Apple buzz last week, RIM experienced its longest major outage in its history, with a three day long outage that affected most users around the globe. Service was fully restored last Friday to all regions, but the rumbling from frustrated BlackBerry users continued long after their devices woke up from their paperweight-like state. Carriers with affected users have been placating their subscribers with credits and free service to compensate for the outage, and anyone with an axe to grind and a blog has been opining about RIM needing to do something directly.

It seems that RIM has been listening, and are committed to fostering some goodwill with their loyal users, as they posted an announcement up this morning telling us exactly what they plan to do. Beginning Oct 19th, a list of premium apps will be made available for free download through App World, as “compensation” for the outage. I haven’t done the math myself, but a quick look at the list indicates that if someone were to download the whole list, it would be worth a good $30-$40, not a bad compensation for 3 days with no email.

• SIMS 3 - Electronic Arts

• Bejeweled - Electronic Arts

• N.O.V.A. - Gameloft

• Texas Hold’em Poker 2 - Gameloft

• Bubble Bash 2 - Gameloft

• Photo Editor Ultimate - Ice Cold Apps

• DriveSafe.ly Pro - iSpeech.org

• iSpeech Translator Pro - iSpeech.org

• Drive Safe.ly Enterprise - iSpeech.org

• Nobex Radio™ Premium - Nobex

• Shazam Encore - Shazam

• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant - Vlingo

For their BlackBerry Enterprise market, RIM is offering a free month of tech support. Current BES users will be given a one-month extension on a current technical support plan free of charge, and users that do not currently have a plan will be given a one-month free trial of their service.

The full press release can be found on RIM’s site here. There will inevitably be those that scoff at the offer, but the fact that RIM is even doing this speaks volumes for their willingness to try and make this right. What do you think? Sound off in the comments!