Mobile Phone Blog:

Apple, no stranger to getting slapped on the wrist over their adverts, have been, erm, slapped on the wrist again over their latest advert for the iPhone 3G, which has now been banned, according to The Boy Genius Report. The reason?

Basically, the Advertising Standards Authority have decided the advert will mislead people to believe the iPhone 3G has way faster internet access than it actually has.

Therefore, it’s deemed misleading.

Therefore, it’s banned in its current form.

Therefore, I point at Dan, our resident iPhone owner, and laugh, as I do whenever there’s a news story that’s not gone Apple’s way (hey, I have to follow my own particular idiom).

However, was it a fair decision? Well, having seen his iPhone 3G in action, I can categorically state there ain’t no way it is as fast as that advert pegged it to be. Put it this way, my Sony Ericsson P1 could just about outrun it, and something like the HTC Touch HD would leave it for dead. To be fair to Apple, they didn’t explicitly state that it would load pages in a specific time, but the people who rang in to complain said that the time that pages loaded on the fake iPhone in the ad was far shorter than any real-life iPhone 3G can ever manage, and was therefore a massive, big misdirection. Personally, I would’ve said that most people can gauge the difference between reality and marketing-spin, and I don’t reckon I’d have banned it on those grounds.

Apple sulkily replied that the advert shows relative not absolute speeds, which sounds a bit of a cop-out to me, but have complied and pulled the advert from our screens. And that bit is fine by me, since that chirpy git who does the voiceovers on those ads gets right up my nose. That’s why I’d ban it…

Somehow, though, I don’t think Apple will be particularly bothered about the ad being pulled, since Apple fans have a tendency to buy three iPhones each, and it’s selling well, anyway…

Meanwhile, if you want a better phone, grab yourself the HTC Touch HD today!