We know you have no reason to trust us, on this of all days, but we assure you this is news is not just legit—it’s too legit to quit. Apple’s posted three new iPhone spots on its website: Bet, Brilliant, and Music Store. These are what we like to call “Type A” iPhone commercials, which focus on showing off the iPhone’s interface.
Music Store focuses on, as you might guess, the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, showing how you can browse, sample, and buy music all from your phone (interesting that they’re just getting around to showing this off, even though it’s been around for six months or so).
Spot number two, Brilliant, shows off the new Location-based features that we got at Macworld earlier this year. Thank goodness they’re using Wi-Fi-based location, since when I tried cell phone triangulation from the Macworld offices back in January, the best it could tell me was that I was in San Francisco—useful if I’d been locked in the truck of a car and dumped in an empty field somewhere, but less useful when you’re, er, conscious.
The third ad, Bet, is my favorite, since it’s the kind of thing that I’ve found is more likely to get you eye rolls and derogatory remarks: how you can use the iPhone to settle bets with your friends. “Then you have the Internet…and five bucks. In your pocket.” This is why nobody bets me anything anymore.
Also effective is the concluding scene, used consistently through all iPhone ads: the elaborate task under demonstration is interrupted by a telephone call. A subtle reminder, unspoken in all but one of the ads, that all this fancy stuff is happening on a mobile phone.
I think the ads are great, but as an iPhone owner I know the reality of surfing on the web over EDGE would take five times as long as all three commercials put together.
"These are what we like to call “Type A” iPhone commercials, which focus on showing off the iPhone's interface."
Hasn't every iPhone commercial been this way? That's why they were so revolutionary from the start. All usability, no hardware.
@michael Don't forget the Type B "testimonial" commercials.
http://iphone.macworld.com/2007/10/new_iphone_adsin_midair.php
Oh yea, you're right. I forgot about the bad iPhone ads.
You know what's creepy about those commercials? The hand holding the phone, except for when it moves off the screen at the end, it doesn't move at all. Even on the closeups, not the slightest twitch. I'm imagining them filming the commercials with the phone held by a severed arm that's bolted to a table.
Notice that they us the same frame all the time. It's always 9:42 am.