Shameful marketing ploy? Samsung challenges iPhone to Ice Bucket Challenge

By now your social media sites are drenched in videos of people dumping buckets of ice on themselves, a viral stunt to raise money and awareness for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) research. Everyone from celebrities, your mates to tech CEOs have joined the cause and now Samsung’s eagle-eyed marketing team have jumped in - using the challenge to troll and make fun of Apple, HTC and Nokia. Samsung put its flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone through the Ice Bucket Challenge by having a bunch of cold ice dumped on itself and challenged the iPhone 5s, the HTC One (M8) and the Nokia Lumia 930 to do the same thing. Of course, none of those handsets boast a water-resistant casing like the Galaxy S5, though one YouTube user put their iPhone at risk and took the challenge, and apparently it didn’t result in a dead phone. Samsung donated money to a UK organization fighting the same condition as the ALS Association. Nevertheless, the stunt has attracted a lot of criticism online with tech blogs calling it unscrupulous.

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