You know how when you screw up badly with your significant other and you buy them a present because you hope that will smooth everything over? No? You’ve never done that because they are way too smart to fall for something like that? Yeah, that’s my experience too.

Anyway: BlackBerry.

Starting Wednesday, BlackBerry owners will be able to download a bunch of premium apps for free. The company is hoping that people’s love of games like the Sims, Texas Hold ’em, and the Siri-like Vlingo will help them forget about the outages last week that kept customers from using email, browsing the web, or sending texts. The whole list of apps is in a BlackBerry press release, where there is also promise of more free stuff to be announced.

Also, RIM’s annual developer’s conference starts tomorrow. Another big test for the company’s survival: to see whether people still want to build apps for its products.