It’s not rare to see an advertisement in tech directly call out the competition. Whether it’s the famous Mac vs. PC ads from back in the day or the Pixel burning the iPhone 7’s lack of a headphone jack, rivalries in these commercials are certainly commonplace. Samsung’s new ad campaign takes a more subtle approach to this “throwdown” advertising, but the message is still clear — Samsung wants you to know its AMOLED displays are better than Google’s and LG’s POLED.
The 30-second ad takes clips from popular YouTube tech reviewers, each talking about how excellent Samsung’s displays are. While no other companies are named or mentioned, reminders are sprinkled in of how phones that aren’t Samsung all look the same, or that Samsung makes the best screens in the industry.
It’s not necessarily what’s in the ad that makes it a blow to LG and Google’s POLED displays, but when the ad was released. The LG V30 and the Google Pixel 2 XL are both suffering from display issues, such as uneven and flat colors, poor viewing angles, screen burn-in, and even pixel smearing:
We can’t imagine the ad would like to taunt the iPhone X’s OLED display, considering its Samsung who makes those screens in the first place. Maybe the company hopes Google regrets its decision to go with LG’s POLED displays and sides with Samsung for the Pixel 3. Only time will tell.
Update: Google Responds
Google, understandably displeased with this negative news, issued two separate press updates on Thursday addressing the Pixel 2 criticisms. One update actually summarizes the situation right from the get-go:
tl;dr: We’re very confident that the Pixel 2 delivers an exceptional smartphone experience, and to give users peace of mind, every Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL will now come with a 2-year warranty worldwide.
That 2-year warranty by no means is an admission of fault, at least according to Google. The company claims the Pixel 2 XL displays are designed to look more natural, so that’s really the problem. Google says they will be releasing an update that gives users more control over the color saturation, however they made a point to say that there was an option to boost saturation by 10% already in place.
Google also claims that the burn-in (they call it differential aging) issues are being taken seriously, however the Pixel 2 XL’s POLED displays show no worse signs of burn-in than other equivalent smartphone displays. The message here, essentially, is “don’t blame us.”
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