The U.K. Advertising Standards Authority has recently labeled a TV advertisement for Apple’s iPhone ‘misleading’ for claiming the device provides full Internet access. But Apple is not the only offender, here,” said Tony Cripps, senior analyst at Ovum.
According to him, the consultancy firm has previously voiced discomfort with other operator launches of ‘mobile Internet’ services that professed to offer access to the full Web. “Many of these are similarly compromised through the selective rendering, removal, or adaptation, of complex content such as Flash and Java in the network into a form consumable by the device, but not necessarily representative of the web developer’s full intent,” he added.
The ‘misleading’ Apple iPhone advert has subsequently been banned.
Web Sites Fail to Render
Cripps pointed out that even though this approach could, and did, deliver a decent web experience in many instances, a good proportion of websites still failed to render properly, or had been broken in some way, that made them unusable, leading to a poor user experience.
“This isn’t anyone’s fault, per se,” he said. “Limited device capabilities, often slow connections to the Internet and a legacy of efforts to capture a web-style experience through the use of WAP, continue to limit the ability of today’s mobile devices to fully render web content themselves.
“In the final analysis, Apple doesn’t deserve to be hauled over the coals for what is essentially a result of a marketer being mildly economical with the truth (possibly unknowingly, given the technical nature of the argument), if other OEMs and mobile operators are let off scot-free,” he said.