What The Banned iPhone Ad Should Really Look Like 463
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."
Re:Wait, wait, wait... (Score:3, Informative)
You're telling me there's an organization that actually checks advertisements for false and misleading information, and has the power to pull blatant lies off the air? When did this happen?
I was going to mod you funny, then I saw your sig. Since there is no '+5 listened to H2G2 Series 2', I had to comment instead :)
Something else the advert didn't reflect... (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:Wait, wait, wait... (Score:4, Informative)
You're telling me there's an organization that actually checks advertisements for false and misleading information, and has the power to pull blatant lies off the air? When did this happen?
1962. [wikipedia.org] That's in the UK, though. I don't think we have anything like that in the U.S.
Re:App store (Score:4, Informative)
It is the UK advert that has been banned.
Re:No, this is typical for virtually anyone sellin (Score:2, Informative)
Lower than 3:1? It's 4.86:1.
PC Pro / Apple Ad = (2*60+21)/29 = 4.86.
That's closer to 5.
Re:Not a good example (Score:3, Informative)
> 'Cause the iPhone doesn't have WiFi.
You sure about that, chief?
'cause I can somehow connect to the AP in my house, and I'm pretty sure it's not a 3G base station.
The grandparent DID miss one thing, though -- the location test. He can't do it properly on his touch, since AFAIK the touch doesn't have an adaptive GPS unit. It just tries to guess based on known locations of nearby WiFi APs.
I just tested mine, it took about 15 seconds to narrow down my location to a region about 1/2 mile in radius. And it won't do any better than that unless I stand near the window or go outside.
How the ad got banned (Score:5, Informative)
Seems to me Apple didn't really defend this one very appropriately, but then again, who cares?
Re:In the UK (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not a good example (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:No, this is typical for virtually anyone sellin (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Re:Something else the advert didn't reflect... (Score:1, Informative)
Slashdot is notorious on my iPhone for crashing Safari. I think it has something to do with all the Javascript they've thrown in on the site. /. while i'm not logged on to the site.
/. on my iPhone using the NetNewsWire app it won't crash at all ?!
Things get slightly better for me when I'm reading
Remarkably enough, when i'm reading
Re:No, this is typical for virtually anyone sellin (Score:5, Informative)
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'.
Re:Either the cretins at PCPro Mag are morons... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:No, this is typical for virtually anyone sellin (Score:4, Informative)
Not even mentionning that the iPhone used is not an iPhone 3G but an iPhone Edge (CPU speed and other factors actually do matter in these tests) and that the demo starts with the iPhone turned off in the PCPro demo. And they don't zoom with double tap, they go to "big" websites, etc...
I am not saying the Apple version was realistic, but hey, the PCPro one is just as biaised in the other direction.
Re:Beauty treatments (Score:3, Informative)
For those of you that don't know Cadbury are a chocolate company that are big in the UK and Ireland, I'm not sure if their products are sold elsewhere. They are most popular for their milk chocolate, not to get into a flame war about chocolate, but for mass produced stuff it bloody good :)
Anyway here's a Youtube link [youtube.com] to ad.
Also for some reason every time I see it it takes about 20 seconds for me to remember what the ad is for, but it always totally engages me.
Re:Something else the advert didn't reflect... (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, to mod up, or reply. I was having this exact same problem, safari would crash sometimes when the page seemed to be attempting to render, sometimes when i'd scroll, and some times if a dog barked. This was happening upwards of five times a day. So I googled it, followed suggestions and cleared history, cache, cookies, but that didn't help. Then I disabled javascript and add-ons, and changes allow cookies to from visited, and it hasn't crashed in two days. Hope it works for you, b/c it was getting bad enough that I was going to buy something else.
Re:No, this is typical for virtually anyone sellin (Score:3, Informative)
Whatever it was, it wasn't "copy and paste." The iPhone can't do that.