To start off, we never anticipated that this April Fools joke will fool larger audiences. Deepak came up with the idea to write a April Fools post and this is a very common practice in the blogosphere. This idea immediately came to my mind as the iPhone 3GS was launched just a few days ago and I thought writing about the iPhone 3G would be great. My aim was to write a joke that was very believable. The price was set to Rs. 15,000 initially but we realized that the joke should be believable and we changed it to Rs. 18,499; neither too high nor too low, just about right. To generate some buzz, Deepak started tweeting about the so called ‘Big Announcement’ and it got a good response.
To make it look more authentic I designed the document and took snaps of it from my monitor to make it look like it was leaked. I not also mentioned about the prices of both the models but also included the ‘fake’ data plans. We did not mention the name of any carrier because we didn’t want to get into trouble as this was just a joke. Though it was easy to make out the logo and it was purposely designed just to spice it up. We added a small loophole in this joke. If you look closely at the first screenshot, the iPhone 16GB (White/Black) is said to have 8GB flash memory. Some people figured it out though.
Few of our readers were smart enough and pointed out that this was a prank in the comments section. Many people knew this was a joke but interestingly many websites/blogs wrote about this story. Here are some of the blogs and websites who re-blogged and tweeted this story:
- FoneArena
- Think Digit
- Technoholik
- Trak.in
- Tech-Exclusive
Our intention was just to fool our readers and celebrate the April Fools Day and not to gain publicity. Sorry guys, even we wished it was this cheap and believe us, even we would have got excited.
But one thing to be noted about this prank is it should inspire big Indian telecom carriers to lower the prices of the older handsets, atleast which still have great demand in Indian market and can sell like hot cakes. This will be a win-win situation for both the sellers and the end users. We hope that the Indian telecom service providers take a note of this.
Now what shall I say? This was a Good April Fools this year on the internet for all iPhone fanboys in India.
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Great,you guys really worked hard to make people april fool.The leaked document was fantastic idea and that made people believe about the story.But don’t you think the operator whose information you claimed to have got hold on, may take some action against your blog.
Anyway great april fool idea.
Thanks for your compliments. Well, about legal issues, we were not the one to specifically mention any Indian operator’s name. 🙂
pls sir tell me what is .vid extention file . thish type file creat my china made mobile when i have shoot a vidio. i cant paly this type file in my pc.
@Naresh
Guess this link may help you to run those video formats on PC