In Barcelona we saw Microsoft doing the “Smoked by” challenge daily. The rather minimalist stand had this white-board showing the winners and losers. The winners bagged some cash and the losers probably thought that Windows Phone was better.
Is it? Well, that’s personal preference, but the whole “challenge” has been setup in a way that makes it difficult to win. The marketing people know that Windows Phone does certain things quicker than most other phones, but that’s only if you don’t alter the other phones. Android, as you all know, is easy to customize, and one owner had a handy widget up-front for showing the weather in two different locations and had already disabled his lock screen. He visited a local Microsoft store and entered the challenge, then couldn’t believe his luck when the particular task was to show the weather in two different places in the quickest time possible.
He won, and shouted “DONE” pretty much instantly, but the staff thought differently, changing the rules afterwards and then simply stating that he’d lost “just because”.
Now, I witnessed this challenge during Mobile World Congress and unsurprisingly Windows Phone won most of the time. Let’s face it, if you were doing the marketing for Microsoft, would you create a challenge with tasks that you’d fail? No.
However, the tasks involved uploading a photo to Facebook, texting a friend or checking email. If you put the right widget on your Android phone and de-activate the lock screen then you could probably get rich pretty quick, but this Skattertech article shows how you probably won’t.
Links – Earlier story – Skattertech
I’ve heard them running challenges such as “First phone to boot up with a Windows logo” and “First phone to unlock and show tiles”. Incidentally, I love the most knowledgeable entry at the top of the list being a “Samsung Android”. I must look out for that model.
Surely the point of the challenge is to see what the phones do in their raw native format, not when you have loaded apps from thrid parties?