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Samsung Courts iPhone Users With $1 Galaxy Test Drive Program

Act now!
Image: Samsung

Samsung really wants you to stop using your iPhone.

The Korean giant rolled out a promotion this morning that lets current iPhone owners test drive a Galaxy Note5, Galaxy S6 edge, or Galaxy S6 edge+ for a full 30 days for only $1. The offer is not tied to any specific wireless carrier, and comes with a free data plan for the duration of the trial period.

As Motherboard has previously detailed, Samsung is in a particularly tricky spot here in the second half of 2015: by many accounts the Note5 and S6 edge+ are excellent devices, but Apple has such a stranglehold on the high-end of the smartphone market that the company has to resort to promotional programs like this just to get people in the door. Pressure on the low-end of the smartphone market from companies like Xiaomi, OnePlus, and Huawei doesn't do Samsung any favors either.

Test drive programs like this are rare but not completely unprecedented. T-Mobile, which is now the third-largest wireless carrier in the US, ran a similar test drive program for the iPhone 5s in 2014, a program that the Current Analysis research firm said "wasn't a disaster, but [didn't] explode like T-Mobile thought it might."