Many of you will remember that earlier this year, Google and KitKat teamed up to give away Nexus 7s as part of a competition. In fact, some of you might be reading this on the shiny 2013 Nexus 7 you received from Nestle and Google. Unless, that is, if you’re a winner from India that is. The winners of the #Androidkitkat competition in India are only just getting their Nexus 7s delivered to their doors and understandably, they’re not very happy. Instead of getting the 2013 model of the Nexus 7 – like every other region in the competition – they’ve been given the 2012 model of the Nexus 7. Certainly, you can argue that a free tablet is, at the end of the day, a free tablet. However, there seems to have been something wrong with how the competition was handled in India.
The above is a screenshot from the KitKat.in website and anyone who has seen this year’s Nexus 7 will notice that the tablet featured in a declaration to winners is indeed, the 2013 model of the Nexus 7. So, you would think that the first 1,000 winners in India would get the tablet advertised, right? Wrong. As users in this Facebook group have demonstrated, every tablet that has arrived so far is the Nexus 7 from last year.
Of course, the fact that these two somewhat different tablets have exactly the same name but, in all of the promotional material for the contest ran in India, last year’s tablet is not the tablet advertised. Which puts Nestle, and probably Google, too into shady territory. It’s one thing promising something but, then delivering something else, no matter how similar they might be. The KitKat India Twitter handle has release a pretty poor excuse for this and simply said: “We hear you’re unhappy. Winners got the Nexus7 tabs available in India in Sept (contest date). The new version launched only in Nov.” Again, that would be understandable if the 2012 model of the Nexus 7 was used in the material advertising the contest, which it wasn’t.
It’s hard to complain about something you’ve been given for free but, when everyone else around the world has been given something arguably better, it’s no wonder Indians are angry. If the 2012 model was used in adverts leading up to the contest’s draw, we doubt this would be any more than a few tweets here and there but, the fact is that one tablet was promised. Everyone else in the world got the tablet that was promised, meanwhile in India, they didn’t get the same tablet promised to them. Hopefully, Google and nestle step in to fix this but, we’ve yet to hear anything more apart from the above tweet.