In conjunction with Microsoft, AT&T launched a Windows Phone buy one, get one free sale for the holiday season. Starting on Black Friday, this sale kicked off less than a month after the handset officially launched in early November. The sale may have delighted holiday shoppers, but its timing raised the ire of the early adopters who bought the handset at launch and were not eligible for the BOGO sale.
Before you call AT&T to chew out the manager and return your handset, you should swing by your local AT&T store. A recent tweet from the official Windows Phone account on Twitter suggests that AT&T may honor the Windows Phone BOGO offer if you bought your handset within the past 30 days. Details were not provided but it looks as though AT&T will honor the buy one, get one free offer without making customers return and re-buy their handset.
Presumably this offer is coming straight from the coffers of Microsoft. The Redmond company continues to dump a ton of cash into Windows Phone as it tries to boost sales via advertising and promotions. The tally for promotions such as the AT&T Black Friday offer is not known, but the company is thought to have spent over $500 million on advertising for its “save us from our phone” campaign. Microsoft is also pumping cash into app development and is reportedly paying big name developers to write applications for its nascent mobile platform.
Microsoft is committed to this mobile platform and while we should not expect all sales such as this to be retroactive, it is nice to see Microsoft and AT&T stepping up to the plate on this one. Any early adopters out there happy enough with Windows Phone to snag a second handset?
[Via Mobility Digest and Twitter]