Ah, cellphones and dodgeball, they go together like… well… they don’t really go together at all, but that’s not stopping Samsung Mobile from organizing what will purportedly be the world’s largest dodgeball game on May 12.
The practice of launching a stunt to herald the advent of a new product is nothing new — remember when the Droid took over Times Square? And Samsung is no stranger to the record realm; it attempted to make the World Record for collecting the largest donation of mobile phones in one location in April at the Samsung Mobile 500 at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, TX (the company failed). And managed to set the World Record for the fastest text message sent using Swype technology on the Samsung Omnia II.
Still, the idea of marrying the most emotionally scarring childhood sport to a phone launch is admittedly pretty cool. According to Samsung, the event is meant to educate users on how the phone works. The Reality, which launched in April, is branded as a social networking phone — much like the Microsoft Kin, which also launched in April on Verizon. It boasts a Communities widget that lets users access and update sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Photobucket and Flickr.
You can get on the action by RSVPing to the match — the company is shooting to get 1,500 dodgeball players from the New York Tri-State area involved — on Facebook and keep tabs on Twitter via the hash tag #dodgethis. Players will battle it out to win Samsung Reality phones and gift cards (natch).
Regardless of the merits of the phone (we have yet to try it out, so we don’t know how it stacks up against handsets like the Kin), we think this is a pretty novel way to get users acquainted with the sharing capabilities that it offers. To anyone who plans to participate, good luck… and make sure to post plenty of snaps of the demoralized losing team via your brand new celly.