How much is your privacy worth?
If you were willing to give up a little personal information – and give Samsung access to your Facebook timeline – the company had a fairly compelling deal for you. In exchange for taking your Samsung Galaxy S III or Note II smartphone and registering it on Samsung's Facebook page, Samsung was sending out free smartphone flip covers and six free TecTiles for all who participated.
Well, maybe not all.
Those looking to score big on Samsung's offer might be a bit disappointed to learn that supplies for the two eligible phones in the promotion – Samsung's Galaxy S III and Note II smartphones – appear to have run out a day or so after the promotion was first announced, incensing some registrants who feel as if they were "suckered in" by Samsung's promotion only to receive a coupon, at best, for their efforts.
"Why on earth would you not extend this to all who responded!? You can't expect us to believe that more [quantities] are NEVER going to be available. Why not offer those who registered and got confirmation emails at least the tec tiles? This feels very spammy and makes those who REGISTERED and got confirmation feel tricked. If you wanted people to register why not just ask or better yet, why allow us to register if it's supposedly too late!? Be FAIR," wrote one Facebook commenter.
All and all, Samsung's deal was worth around $55 or so for those who managed to score themselves the free smartphone accessories. That's a bit better of a deal than the 50-percent-off coupon that Samsung now appears to be sending those who register their phones on Samsung's Facebook hub – depending on the parameters of the coupon and what one can use it for, we note.
Samsung's offer – or new offer – is only applicable for those registering Galaxy S III or Note II smartphones. Samsung hasn't made any mention of why it's only limiting its promotion to those two devices. Perhaps the company didn't want to unleash the floodgates when it came to handing out smartphone covers. That, and there's the simple fact that that Samsung only makes flip covers for these two devices at the moment.
As for TecTiles, however, these were the real gems of Samsung's offer. Not only could you get six of these little NFC-friendly devices for free, when a five-pack would otherwise set you back around $15 or so, but you could have gained the ability to place programmable prompts around your household, home office, or anywhere else you could think of.
In other words, a TecTile is an NFC tag that you can program with your phone to cover a wide range of activities. And when you hold your phone to said TecTile after the fact, the activity occurs. For example, you could use your Samsung device to program a TecTile such that it causes smartphones to automatically join a specific wireless network whenever their owners touch the MIFARE-supported devices to the tag – things like that.
Sure sounds a lot better than a half-off coupon, wouldn't you say? At least, that seems to be what a growing chorus of commenters on Facebook are indicating, with some going so far as to ask Samsung to at least send the promotion's participants some free TecTiles for their efforts.
For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).
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