Huawei’s new flagship phone, the Mate 10 Pro, is currently available for pre-order in the US despite not having any deals with US carriers. In order to get some attention, it seems the company condescended to having fake reviews for the new phone posted online, as spotted by some of our sources.
These fake reviews exclusively on the Best Buy website may well likely be the result of a contest Huawei ran on Facebook. On the 31st of January, Huawei posted to a Facebook group that had about 60,000 members asking people to leave comments on the Best Buy pre-sale page in exchange for a chance to beta test a Mate 10 Pro. The original post has been deleted, although one of our sources got a screenshot of it before it went down.
On the Best Buy site, there are 108 reviews for the phone, 103 of them were written on or after January 31st when Huawei posted the contest. A lot of the comments reference directly not having any actual hands-on experience whatsoever with the device itself and yet they gave the phone a 5-star rating.
It therefore appears as if Huawei is hoping that high ratings for the device will bring about a large quantity of sales. As good as that thought is however, these kinds of reviews are austerely against the policies of Best Buy.
Huawei’s Mate 10 Pro is going into the OS market at a great disadvantage as it has no carrier partnerships as well as a checkered past with regards to questions about the cosecurity and trustworthiness. The company has once been sued by Cisco for stealing source code and it also faced charges of spying for the Chinese government. AT&T and Verizon pulled out of deals to market and sell the Mate 10 Pro, also at CES, Huawei’s consumer products CEO stated that, “It’s a big loss for us, and also for carriers, but the more big (sic) loss is for consumers, because consumers don’t have the best choice. Everybody knows that in the US market that over 90 percent of smartphones are sold by carrier channels.”
