New iPhone TV Ads: Where's The Phone?

Apple posted three new iPhone television ads on their site this evening. Unlike earlier ads, where the star of the show was the phone itself (and the user interface), these new ads focus on three actors – all men – who are using the phone to solve problems.

Doug likes the visual voicemail. Elliot is searching for a name on a website. And Stephano, who appears to be a mechanic, loves the fact that he doesn’t need to carry a man purse around any more (he calls it a “little bag”) to hold all of his gadgets – the iPhone does it all.

The phones are barely shown in the ads, and only in the first one is it actually turned on. That probably makes sense, since so many of us had our phones bricked with the recent software update. We couldn’t turn them on, either.

My thought is that Apple should mix a woman or two into the ads, and perhaps focus on the wow factor of the phone (like the user created ads) over its simple utilitarian feature list. Because the truth is, while I love my iPhone, the Blackberry is still a better feature-by-feature communication device. Anyway, these days Apple has money to burn testing out these new spots, so let the audiences decide.