Apple's video of iPhone 3G shows its marketing prowess Matt Hamblen July 02, 2008 (Computerworld) The marketing prowess of Apple Inc. is legendary, a reputation that was bolstered again yesterday by a slick 30-minute online video that offers a guided tour of the iPhone 3G coming on July 11.
The video is much longer than a previous video that appeared for the first-generation iPhone a year ago, but features the same narrator, Bob Borchers. Borchers is not a professional actor, as many have thought, but is the senior director of the Apple iPhone product line. Borchers, wearing the collarless black shirt commonplace among Apple presenters, describes a wide array of product features without much specific emphasis on what is new to the iPhone 3G. Still, he makes it clear that using a faster 3G network, one of the major added features in the new iPhone, will help users in downloading Web pages and video. Some of the focus of the tour is on potential business users, so the video shows the capabilities of visual voice mail for picking through long lists of voice mails by the sender's name and using a simple touch to listen to a voice-mail recording. Push e-mail capabilities and quick navigation of long e-mail in-boxes are also explained. Photos attached to e-mails appear next to the text without the need to open an attachment, Borchers explains. Some of the material covered in the video is specific, such as showing the ways a user trains to use the touch keyboard, which can change size depending on the application. A theme throughout is personalization of the device, including the ability to customize icons on each of nine different possible home pages. The presentation is like a video instruction manual at times, designed to help potential buyers visualize how they might use the device, analysts said. Analysts said the video is unusual in smart-phone marketing. It is also distinctive because, at 30 minutes, it is lengthy and intimate, with a narrator talking directly to the audience, with up-close demonstrations of how an application works. Many other cell phone makers and cell phone carriers have elaborate marketing campaigns and offer users the ability to hold and try out phones in their stores before making a purchase, but the video shows how far Apple is willing to go, analysts said. ... http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9106218 ******************************* * POST TO [EMAIL PROTECTED] * ******************************* Medianews mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
