In the latest twist of the guerrilla marketing warfare over the iPhone 4’s reception problems, Samsung has begun shipping out free phones to people who posted negative messages about the iPhone 4 on their Twitter account.
Samsung has apparently dug through thousands of Tweets and found people who had purchased Apple’s phone only to become disappointed with the highly publicized design flaw that makes it easy to drastically lose signal strength.
“Thanks for your tweet – want to try out our new Samsung Galaxy S? We’ll send you one to test against your current handset,” Samsung wrote in response to one user’s online message.
A handful of people were picked to receive a free unit of Samsung’s latest phone, which it claims will not suffer from the same kind of antenna problems.
“Recently there has been a real increase in online activity from consumers dissatisfied with some of our competitors’ products. We decided to contact a cross section of individuals to offer them a free Samsung Galaxy S as a replacement, as we’re confident that once people have the phone in their hands, they’ll see how impressive it is for themselves,” Samsung said in a CNN interview with company officials.
It’s the latest move by Samsung to fight back after Apple, perhaps unjustly, attacked its Omnia 2 phone in an iPhone 4 press conference that focused more on mocking other phones than it did on admitting failure in the iPhone’s design.
“Our design keeps the distance between a hand and an antenna,” said Samsung in response to Jobs’ stinging comments. “Reception problems have not happened so far, and there is no room for such problems to happen in the future.”
Because Jobs whipped the entire thing up into a flurry of attacks against every other major smartphone manufacturer, there has become something of a war between Apple and the rest of the industry. Incidentally, not to be forgotten from Apple’s press conference is that it was in fact revealed that more calls are being dropped on the iPhone 4 than any other iPhone, while no such problems are being reported on any of the devices that Jobs has called out.
