Delyan Kratunov was contacted by an agency to promote an upcoming Samsung app challenge:
The questions should be casual and organic. Like “Anyone know anything about SSAC? or…”Need some feedback on the app I am about to enter for the Samsung Smart App Challenge.” You have a dialogue with people that reply. That is it! 4 questions spread out over a month (August 31st is the deadline to enter).
Now this has all come to light, the agency has been in touch to redact their offer.
Please note that our request to promote via these public channels is a breach against their Terms of Service and could result in your account being terminated. We do not condone such actions that contradict the respective forum policies and would like to redact any correspondences made.
Very dodgy.
While I’m riffing on this topic, there’s also been some weird stuff going on with Anandtech finding the Galaxy S4 boosting performance in certain benchmarking apps.
Samsung have since clarified with a blog post explaining the rationale behind their ‘boost mode’ (& Anandtech has also followed up on Samsung’s post) but the reality is that benchmarking apps still exhibit GPU gains that a typical Android game cannot match.
Also pretty dodgy.
I recycled an old iMac last week at Vodafone’s Big Life Switch event in Brisbane, and I was lucky enough to win a Galaxy S4 in their random draw. I like the device (expect a feature next week), but the Samsung software that permeates it is really obnoxious to me and absolutely spoils the overall experience.