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What The Banned iPhone Ad Should Really Look Like
Barence writes "To demonstrate just how misleading the latest (and now banned) iPhone television ad really is, PC Pro has recreated it using an iPhone 3G and a Wi-Fi connection — with laughable results. Apple was forced to pull the advert today after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) decided it exaggerated the speed of mobile browsing. 'In the 30-second clip the iPhone is shown loading a webpage, finding its current location in Google Maps, opening a PDF from an email and finally taking a phone call. The ASA concluded that the iPhone cannot do what was shown in the mere 29 seconds afforded in the advert, ruling that it was misleading.' Try it for yourself and you'll undoubtedly agree."
... was the instability of Safari - I'm currently away from the office on a week long business trip, with my iPhone acting as my primary browsing device during the day (while I'm away from the hotel - London has fairly extensive 3G and wifi coverage), and I have to say that I am getting at least one crash per browsing session.
I would expect this if I was visiting weird websites, but I'm talking about sites like Slashdot, BBC News etc. The entire page can be loaded, and I can be halfway through a Slashdot comments page and Safari will crash, I haven't even hit anything that should trigger Safari to do anything other than scroll down the page!
On another note, on every iPhone or iPod Touch device I have used (one first gen iPhone, one 3G iPhone and two iPod Touches), Safari has one hell of a difficult time picking up link clicks on the BBC News website - I haven't had any problems elsewhere, just on the BBC News site. It manifests itself as a total lack of registering the fact that I am clicking on a link, with Safari only reacting at all either after I have held down the click for several seconds, or zoomed right in and clicked then. Has anyone else experienced this?
The Grauniad has an item which gives some insight into how the ad came to be banned: Here
Seems to me Apple didn't really defend this one very appropriately, but then again, who cares?
Actually, I did the whole test and did it in 42 seconds on 3G. Here are the results:
14 seconds to load the apple iphone page (the main google page loads in about 8)
10 seconds to load my location on gps
10 seconds to load a pdf attachment from an email (exchange, 100KB pdf)
8 seconds to call my house (I dialed it directly).
The same test took about a minute an a half on wireless (my iphone doesn't gps well on wireless and took over a minute).
My iphone is not unlocked either, and I am on Rogers in Canada. Maybe our 3G is different, but I doubt it. Also, the same pdf from a pop3 account took 36 seconds, so that might also make a difference.
I once saw a documentation about how they make the photos you see on convenience food packaging. The tomato soup with a cream swirl was actually 100% toxic-if-ingested wall paint. Other dishes were either made by cooks (of course using completely different recipes) or weren't food at all. Don't think only models get airbrushed; food does, as well. With clear varnish, during the shoot.
I mean, some car manufacturer recently ran a TV ad in Germany where they deconstructed the usual car ad by gradually switching off the humans (all professional models), the beautiful scenery (completely computer-generated), the brilliant highlights on the car (ditto), the majestic music and finally the street. I don't remember which car it was but the ad strikes me as insightful - it shows just how much of the ads you see has to do with the actual car (not much at all, not even the car's appearance is realistic).
Ads lie. Ads lie all the time. Do not expect anything you hear in an ad to be remotely true, apart fom "product XYZ exists".
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Who doesn't? Went to Wendy's the other day and got a #2 combo because it looked pretty awesome on the order board.
Got back to the office and opened it up to discover something pretty gross looking, a mash of squashed bun and grey meat. Yum.
I actually worked at Wendy's back in high school, and we did a challenge once where we tried to make the food look like the 'order board' to use your words. Turns out its not that hard... but
1) You had to use fresh toasted buns straight off the toaster
2) You had to 'cherry pick' things like lettuce and tomatoes.
3) You had to have someone who really knew how to work 'grill' to get perfect looking meat.
4) Most importantly - you couldn't wrap it up. You had to serve it unwrapped. Wrapping ALWAYS squashes it to at least some degree, and meat drippings and condiment get spread to the wrapper.
That said, a significant percentage of burgers actually look a lot like the advertising, prior to wrapping, when made by competent staff.
So...I'm not saying Wendy's isn't false advertising, but in their case at least, the real food CAN actually look like the ads, even though it usually doesn't. So at least they aren't showing food that simply can't come out of their 'kitchens'.
You are not testing the same thing. The UK advert was promoting fast 3G browsing speed on the O2 network. Your video is clearly not using O2's 3G network - Google maps takes a lot longer to load up tiles than the 1/2 second or so it does in your video. And you don't do the full claim - "finding directions" is not the same as starting Google maps, zooming in, and exiting. In fact, you don't appear to use the keyboard at all in your video, so apparently you're just loading pre-generated data, and not actually carrying out any of the tasks the adverts says are being carried out.