Watchdog bans iPhone TV ad in Britain

London: Apple Inc has been banned from showing a "misleading" television advertisement for the iPhone handset in the United Kingdom for the second time in four months by the country's advertising watchdog.

The ad for the iPhone 3G misled consumers about the speed with which they can access the internet, the Advertising Standards Authority said in a statement on Thursday.

Websites

In August, the watchdog banned another Apple ad for wrongly suggesting the device allows use of all functions of all websites.

In the latest ad, Apple claimed the iPhone 3G was "really fast" and showed the handset surfing a news website, viewing the Google maps service and downloading a file.

All the procedures had waiting times of a fraction of a second.

The visuals were likely to lead viewers to believe the device actually operated at or near to the speeds shown in the ad, the authority said. "Because we understood that it did not, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead," it said.

Apple told the regulator the advertisement was intended to compare the iPhone 3G with the slower 2G predecessor and the implication that the 3G iPhone allowed downloads and Internet access that was "really fast" by comparison wasn't misleading.

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, is widening its business beyond the iPod media player and Macintosh personal computers, which together account for about 75 per cent of sales.

Mobile clients

Telefonica SA's O2 unit, which sells the iPhone 3G in the UK, said on November 14 that the number of UK mobile-phone clients rose 6.6 per cent to 19.1 million in the third quarter.

The Advertising Standards Authority said most viewers would be familiar with mobile phones, although "many might not be fully aware of the technical differences between the different types of technology".

It also said the ad didn't give an "explicit indication of a comparison with the older 2G iPhone".