Nokia bungled up its Lumia 920 launch by showing a video not shot with that phone or another phone with Pureview (as an aside it faked still photos too in that video).
They themselves admitted that they should, ‘have posted a disclaimer stating this was a representation of OIS only‘
This made me think how fake is the ad for the new Nokia Asha 305 which is being blasted on Indian television right now. The ad can be seen below. The usual practice is to add a disclaimer below in the ad, typically at the appropriate place, when simulation’s etc., are being shown. And going by Nokia’s own blog disclaimer from above, this is something they would and should do.
The 40 second ad shows 3 songs being downloaded and played. The 3 songs in the ad are shown being downloaded in about 2-3 seconds (11-12 second in the ad; 22-23 second; 28-30 second). These frames themselves don’t mention any disclaimer though towards the end, the voice over (VO) says, ‘download songs in 1 minute’ with a disclaimer that cannot be read even on a HD TV set. Their website states this ‘songs in 1 minute fact’ too with I guess a similar disclaimer.
Firstly, 2 seconds! Secondly, is it a phone speaker or a PA system! They should have clearly given a huge disclaimer for showing these. I won’t go into the quality of the speaker on this phone. What I couldn’t digest is the speed of download. Now, one minute for a full hindi song! A typical hindi song is about 4-7 minutes long and if encoded at a bitrate of 128kb/s, its anywhere between 6-9 MB. You can rarely download a song of such a length in sub 1 minute on a broadband connection.
Here’s my simple back calculation to check. 1) Going by the ad, I am assuming that the phone is on an Airtel network.Though the ad doesn’t state it, I am assuming its a 3G network. Even on plain data usage, the recorded top speed is 460kb/s, at night and 140kb/s during the day. This on a service provider network which offers a speed of 7.2 Mbps. I’ll take 140kb/s for these calculations. 2)The audio file format of the tracks in Nokia Music Store is Windows Media Audio (WMA) with a bit rate of 128kb/s or 192kb/s.I am assuming that the songs available in India are at 192kb/s and 3) The average length of these 3 songs is a little more than 5 minutes. So these songs are about 7,200 kb in length or about 7MB. Theoretically, it should take 51 seconds for each of this song to download at recorded top speed. Now that’s sub 1 minute on a 3G Network.
The truth – The phone shown in the ad is a 305 and not 311. Asha 305 is a 2G (edge) phone while 311 is a 3G one. 2G provides maximum data transfer of about 256.8 kbps. A reasonable estimate of min-max speed is 20-100kbps on such a network in India. So you’ll take a mimimum of 72 seconds for the song to download.
Practically, the Nokia phone shown in the ad cannot download a full song in 1minute. So Nokia, this is another big lie!
I am curious to look at the data from tests carried out across multiple telecom networks in Mumbai, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad on limited songs (as shown in the ad) on Nokia Music from Nokia Music Service that show sub 1 minute downloads.
