Nokia Eats Humble Pie For Misleading Lumia Advert

Nokia has been left looking a little red in the face after officials were forced to admit a teaser advert for its recently-announced Lumia 920 handset was faked.

In the lead up to the unveiling this week of Nokia’s Lumia 920 and 820 smartphones running Windows 8, the Finnish handset giant had issued a teaser video featuring a girl riding a bicycle.

Fake advert

This video footage was of a young woman riding a bike and was meant meant to demonstrate the capabilities of Nokia’s optical image stabilization (OIS) on the Lumia 920 handset, designed to eliminate blurry images and improve pictures shot in low light conditions.

The problem, however, was that Nokia had used a professional camera crew and their equipment, not a Lumia 920 with its 8.7 megapixel PureView camera, to capture the footage.

The falsehood came to light after tech webite The Verge noticed the reflection of a normal camera being used to film the footage in a trailer in the background as the lady cyclist pedalled past it.

Nokia quickly realised it had been rumbled and issued an apology on a blog entitled “an apology is due”, in which it admitted that the video was a ‘simulation’ of OIS.

“Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but we should have posted a disclaimer stating this was a representation of OIS only,” wrote Nokia’s Heidi Lemmetyinen on a blog posting. “This was not shot with a Lumia 920. At least, not yet. We apologise for the confusion we created.”

Included in the blog posting was an actual video used during the press conference of OIS in action, shot using a prototype Lumia 920 handset.

The camera gaffe is another worrying development for troubled Nokia, according to some industry observers.

Nokia’s share price has now recovered after a massive share price collapse following the handsets’ launch, which saw the firm lose nearly 15 percent of its market value.

Analyst reaction

Whilst many can’t see Nokia clawing back market share from the likes of Apple and Samsung, some analysts are a little more optimistic about the Finnish company’s future.

“Nokia’s decision to unveil its second generation Lumia devices in the US is extremely significant for the Finnish handset manufacturer,” noted Tony Cripps, principal analyst at analyst house Ovum.

“Despite recent gains, Windows Phone is not yet performing to Ovum’s expectations,” said Cripps. “This is, at least, partially as a consequence of the strength of the opposition, but partly, we think, as a deliberate move by Microsoft and its hardware partners to avoid flooding the market too quickly with the platform before they are in a position to play up its synergies with other Microsoft products, especially Windows 8 for PCs and tablets, and its business applications.

“As for Nokia itself, the company’s focus on improving the imaging capabilities of its smartphones is a reasonable strategy in an age when meaningful differentiation between different makes of smartphone can be hard to identify.

“There could be also a real opportunity here for Nokia and Microsoft to exploit any shortage of Samsung’s Android-powered smartphones in the market following the US court ruling against the Korean giant in its patent dispute with Apple, although anything too blatant on that front would seem like a low blow,” he said.

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