Last week’s childish Wake Up protest outside Apple’s retail outlet in Sydney has really infuriated fans of Apple as well as a bunch of observers – yours truly included – who pointed the finger of blame at Samsung on shady clues.
While the South Korean conglomerate denied organizing the flashmob-style stunt, coincidental evidence and the ambiguous official wording have left room for some speculation.
New strong pieces of evidence that surfaced last week link the campaign to the embattled BlackBerry maker, Canada-based Research In Motion, as part of their upcoming BlackBerry OS 10 launch on Wednesday. Who knew, right?
Now, according to a MacWorld Australia story yesterday, a DoubleClick ad code found on the Wake Up website sporting a mysterious countdown timer can be traced back to Research In Motion:
So it appears it’s Poor Old RIM who put together this embarrassing campaign. It’s heartbreaking that even when RIM try something cool, they end up screwing it up so badly that no-one even imagines it could be them.
Another clue:
Blackberry OS 10 will be released at 12.30pm Pacific Daylight Time on July 2 (5.30am EST, July 3 in Australia), according to an anonymous email received by Macworld Australia. The source shows that when the Wake Up timer was at 5,493,696 seconds, this equated to 63.584 days, which in turn showed that it would expire at 12:28:36pm on Monday, July 2, 2012.
If this proves true, I’m gonna have to do some mea culping over my strong commentary linking the original smoking gun to Samsung.
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The following bit is also interesting about this dude who filmed the protest video:
It’s also worth noting that Blunty, the lucky man who just happened to be at the Apple store to capture the video of the protesters, has worked with Blackberry in the past. He posted a three part glowing preview of the Blackberry Playbook in the lead up to its Australian launch.
It looks like Samsung was telling the truth when they denied staging the protest.
What’s your take?
Did RIM, already screwed enough, embarrass themselves with this campaign?