Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Samsung hopes to boost the appeal of its upcoming Galaxy S5 smartphone by offering a slew of free premium app subscriptions with the handset. Prospective S5 owners will get more than $500 worth of ”Galaxy Gifts” with their new phone when it hits store shelves in April.
As you might expect, some of the apps included in the free app bundle have lame written all over them, while others are a pretty good deal.
The Galaxy S5 will come with a year’s subscription to RunKeeper Elite ($20), a free 6-month subscription to The Wall Street Journal ($160), three months of Evernote Premium ($15), three months of LinkedIn Premium ($75) and a year’s subscription to Bloomberg Businessweek+ ($30).
All told you’ll get 15 apps with special offers and limited-time subscriptions. It’s a nice treat, especially with a number of seemingly high-quality offers. But with so many apps preloaded on the phone on top of Samsung’s own Galaxy apps, Galaxy Gifts for the S5 smacks of Windows-style crapware.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure many people will enjoy getting free news subscriptions, and why not use up $10 of in-game credits for Cut the Rope 2? But a lot of this stuff will inevitably be deleted from many S5 smartphones when the subscriptions are up.
At least you can enjoy some of these freebies while you’ve got them.
Samsung is no stranger to preloading special app offers with its devices. The company ran a promotion offering 50GB of free Dropbox storage for two years with a number of its devices. Samsung also recently offered a selection of free stuff similar to the S5’s Galaxy Gifts with the Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 in several markets.
The Galaxy S5 is slated to launch on April 11. Pricing for Samsung’s new flagship handset has not been announced.
By: DocMemory
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