Windows Phone Thoughts: Apple iPhone Ads in UK Declared Misleading

"Apple has come under scrutiny on its iPhone 3G for false advertising, and now the Advertising Standards Authority, a UK ad group, has come forth to declare a specific television ad for the touch-based smartphone to be misleading to consumers."

Above is the ad in question, and while I'm not normally a fan of the Eurocratic system of slapping fines on every company they can find, it's pretty easy to see their point here: Apple makes some very bold claims about having the best browsing experience on a mobile device, but that browsing experience comes to a screeching halt as soon as you hit any Web site that uses Flash - and many of them do. These commercials fail to mention that. They also fail to highlight that nothing happens that quickly on a 3G network, but that might be splitting hairs. Java is also mentioned, but I can count the number of times I see the Sun JVM fire up on my PC on one hand - and it's almost always when I'm uploading photos on Smugmug. Is Java on a phone really needed for Web browsing? I don't think it is.

So why did Apple leave Flash out of the iPhone, even in the second generation product? This article has some insights, but I suspect the truth is somewhere along the lines of Adobe wanted "x" amount in royalties off every iPhone sold, and Apple balked at that. That's just my guess mind you, but the iPhone has a lot of power under the hood so I find it likely that the blocking point here is business negotiations, not a technological limitation.

Adobe has fumbled the ball for years on mobile devices. Their model on the desktop has been giving away the player for free to encourage developer adoption of Flash, which in turns sells all their commercial Flash development tools - and we've seen how that's worked out extremely well. For reasons of short-sighted profit, they turned that around on the mobile device side of things: they seem to want licensing fees to put Flash on any mobile phone. And that's the reason why to this day we haven't seen any great Flash implementations on a Windows Mobile device. Maybe there's an opportunity here for Microsoft to steal some Flash thunder with Silverlight? If they released Silverlight clients for the iPhone and Windows Mobile, they'd give Flash developers a viable alternative for mobile device playback?