News: Did Microsoft cheat when Windows Phone got “smoked” by the Galaxy Nexus?

Microsoft started its “Smoked by Windows Phone” campaign at CES where we saw Ben Rudolph pitting Windows Phone against Android smartphones and iPhones for certain challenges and we saw Windows Phone winning 90 % of those challenges and those who were able to beat him won $100 and losers had to admit on the camera that they were “Smoked by Windows Phone”. The campaign was pretty successful and we saw Ben visiting California Stores with the challenge and Nokia too made a similar campaign to boost its Lumia line-up named “Blown Away by Lumia”. Recently, we saw Microsoft increasing the stake of the challenge by giving winners a limited edition laptop worth $1000. But the higher stakes may have been having an impact on Microsoft’s decision of choosing the winner.

Sahas Katta, blogger from Skatter Tech decided to take the challenge when he heard of the new high stake and with his Galaxy Nexus and all the widgets on the homescreen, he was pretty confident but after the challenge took place which was to display the weather in two different cities and luckily he had two weather widgets on his home screen, for two different cities, and no lock screen set up so as soon he pressed the power button he could show the the two weather widgets and Windows Phone finished “a split second later” but the Microsoft employee just didn’t acknowledge his win and instead said that his win didn’t count because the two cities for which he showed the weather were in the same state and the contest required they be from separate states which was never mentioned earlier.

Katta took out his frustration on his blog:

 

“The Microsoft Store employee I was up against then explained the selected challenge. Her exact words were the following: ‘bring up the weather of two different cities.’ The one who could do that first would win. I felt like I struck gold since I knew I already had two weather widgets on my home screen: one for my current location (San Jose, CA) and another for Berkeley, CA.

After a three-second count down, I hit the power button on my phone and said ‘DONE!’ out loud. I had disabled the lock screen entirely, which is a rather awesome out-of-the-box feature of Android that takes you straight to the home screen with a single push of the power button. I didn’t even need to touch the screen, since the two weather widgets were already there.”

 

After the story spread on other sites, Ben Rudolph reached out to Katta on Twitter and apologised and wrote:

This might make Katta happy but we just hope many other challengers might not have too through the same thing.