Samsung Accused of Paying For Negative HTC Reviews

judgecorp writes "Samsung Taiwan has been accused of paying to have negative reviews of HTC products put online by students who recommended Samsung devices instead. The Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission is investigating Samsung's advertising agency in Taiwan, and Samsung Taiwan has responded by cancelling all Internet marketing."

it was to be expected

[swschrad]

after all, they can't bully HTC on patents, so they have to do it by hiring whiners

HTC doesn't need bad reviews

[alen]

they screwed their business themselves

no brand recognition
years of constant new phone releases under new names
crappy support and updates
crappy software. like a mail client with no push email to MS Exchange subfolders when every other android phone maker was doing it

Re:agency: unknown agents and Amazon and books

[BasilBrush]

Does Amazon allow you to review a book if you haven't bought it from them? If so, yes, it's ripe for abuse.

The quality of Apple App Store reviews were low in the early days, as anyone could review anything. So lots of apps got lots of one-star reviews for being 99c rather than free. Or other really stupid reasons.

The quality of reviews rose considerably when only people that had downloaded the app were allowed to review it.

Re:Android

[ackthpt]

This is, actually, normal behaviour from phone manufacturers who use Android as OS. There is tons of competition in the area and put blatantly, Android based setups cant stand out for favour that easily. This makes all the manufacturers play dirty, just like Google does. Don't be evil, my ass.

I wouldn't blame Google for for the work of a few minions of another company.

Reviews are the new lies, though. There's a Brooklyn camera/technology distributor, which routinely has glowing reviews in an online rating service, which seem to utterly fly in the face of many extremely negative reviews. Having briefly interacted with the company I see where the negatives are coming from and from reading the glowing reviews realize there's too much similarity, further, customers have accused them of being encouraged with gifts to leave not just positive reviews, but very positive ones. Further, they do quite a bit to try to have the negatives deleted or discredited. Scared me off so I bought my camera stuff elsewhere.

What we need is a reviewer review site.

...and then a reviewer reviiwer review site...

Samsung Ads

[AlreadyStarted]

Does anyone else notice that many Samsung ads seem less about the products and more about making other people feel bad? I don't own an iPhone, but whenever I see a Samsung ad insulting some apple user all I can think is, "Boy those guys are jerks." If I need a product and the Samsung one is superior I'll probably buy it, but it would cross my mind that I don't want to be a jerk like the people in their ads.

Re:Android

[Old97]

He was informative. The rules of modding are that you don't mod based on whether you agree or not, you mod based on the quality/usefulness of the information provided. Some idiots mod down everything they disagree with so effectively they are trying to censor others. That would make /. much worse. Modding up because you agree would have a similar though less harmful effect. Less harmful in that low modded comments tend to get filtered out. If you'd prefer a site where nothing was posted except what you agreed with then you should start your own.