RIM offers app-ology

Canada's own Research In Motion will offer more than $100 of free apps in appology to BlackBerry customers following last week's planet-wide service outage.  The program will begin on October 19 and initial offerings from RIM include:

• 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

I'm really only familiar with the Nobex Radio app, which is fantastic even in its free form.  I'd even go as far as to suggest that it beats out the station and broadcast company specific apps floating around.  Like the name suggests, it streams radio stations direct to your phone.  Users get the stations in their country for free (and in my experience as a Canadian, you get U.S. stations as well) the premium version will allow listening to stations from over 100 countries.  I still won't be able to listen to CBS programming out of the U.S. but BBC from the UK and ABC from Australia will be nice additions.

SIMS 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A., Bubble Bash 2 and Texas Hold'em Poker 2 are all games.  Great for those who'd rather pass their time living fake lives and matching similar objects to whatever else their phone might let them do.  I don't really play games on my phone, and free ones are unlikely to make me start.

The photo editor is probably exactly what it says, can't imagine why I'd try to do something as imprecise as the track pad on my BlackBerry.  The App World page indicates its pretty fully featured, so maybe its for those people who have a touch screen. 

Shazam Encore listens to a bit of a song and then tells you what it is.  This would have been a handy service 10 years ago but now becuase there are dedicated people who archive song lyrics, you can get by just googling the song's refrain. 

I had to look up what drivesafe.ly is, apparently it reads text (SMS, BBM and email) to the phone's user while driving a car. It's free so I'll try it out even though I'm not sure I'll get much use out of it. iSpeech also makes the phone talk, but it translates between languages. That's neat and I'll take it for free, but it also won't see a whole lot of use.

I guess Vlingo balances off what drivesafe.ly and iSpeech do by allowing the phone's user to speak directly to the phone.  It seems pretty powerful and with a retail price point of $20, it certainly seems worth a test drive.  I imagine it has to be pretty hard on the battery though, but it will be fun pretending to be on Star Trek.  That said, customer ratings of the app on BlackBerry App World seem to be pretty down on the app as of late, so maybe it will be like those episodes of Star Trek where the computer doesn't work properly.

So, not a lineup that excites me a whole lot (other than Nobex) but it is nice that RIM is doing something to address the service outage.  They are also promising more apps to come, though it won't be surprising if these end up being the heavy-hitters of the offerings.