Apple's 'Really Fast' Ad Banned In U.K.

For the second time in four months, an Apple iPhone ad has been banned in the United Kingdom for being misleading.

The country's Advertising Standard Authority said an iPhone ad misleads consumers about how fast the iPhone 3G can access the Internet. The banned ad shows a person using the iPhone to surf the Web, download a file, and viewing Google Maps at very brisk speeds. The ad said the touch-screen smartphone "helps you get the news, really fast," and "download pretty much anything, really fast."

The advertising watchdog said the commercial was likely to lead viewers to believe they would get those types of connectivity speeds on their handsets.

"Because we understood that it did not, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead," the regulator said in a statement.

Before the ad was banned, Apple told the regulator that the commercial was meant to show that the iPhone 3G was "really fast" compared with the first-generation iPhone. The company also said it had a note in the ad that read, "Network performance will vary by location."

The advertising watchdog did not buy it, though, and said the ad didn't give an "explicit indication of a comparison with the older 2G iPhone." The commercial may no longer run in the United Kingdom in its current form.

In August, the ASA made Apple drop another commercial for the iPhone 3G that promised the handset could access "all parts of the Internet." But users complained to the regulator that the iPhone's Safari mobile browser didn't have Flash and Java support.