Apr 27

Palm and AT&T give the Pre Plus (and WebOS) an ad we can all agree is not completely terrible

Posted in: ad, ads, advertising, att, palm, palm pre, PalmPre, Today's Chili
Hey, hey, look at this! A short, sweet Palm Pre Plus ad that shows off the phone’s innovative UI, its ability to multitask, and its 3D gaming — you know, all the great stuff it can do. This is just what pretty much everyone who’s ever had the misfortune of seeing the creepy Palm lady or the Verizon “Mom” ads has been desperately seeking. Sure, it’s taken a over a year for a half-decent ad, and sure, we’ve only seen this one on the web thus far, but we’re hoping to see this one make it to real, live TV, too — because even if it’s a little boring and the music kinda stinks, it’s better than the other options.

Continue reading Palm and AT&T give the Pre Plus (and WebOS) an ad we can all agree is not completely terrible

Palm and AT&T give the Pre Plus (and WebOS) an ad we can all agree is not completely terrible originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apr 16

Sprint’s iPad ‘4G case’ features an Overdrive pocket, oodles of irony

Posted in: 4G, ad, ads, Apple, apple ipad, AppleIpad, BestBuy, ipad, Sprint, Today's Chili, WiMAX

Listen Sprint, we get it, you want the whole US drooling over an iDevice hitting the internet at 4G speeds. First you extolled the virtues of WiMAX in an ad featuring the iPhone, and now you’re going so far as to give away a special “4G” iPad case for free with the purchase of an Overdrive from Best Buy — and yes, to be sure, the tote features a special pouch for your new mobile hotspot. No word yet on if placing a 3G iPad in the case creates some singularity from which no nearby object can escape (or get reception, for that matter).

Update: Don’t take the playful tone personally, we actually love the concept. More so, we just think Sprint is being funny here. We’ll have some detailed test results of our time with Overdrive / iPad soon!

[Thanks, John]

Sprint’s iPad ‘4G case’ features an Overdrive pocket, oodles of irony originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apr 05

Palm splits with ad agency Modernista

Posted in: ad, ads, advertising, breaking news, BreakingNews, palm, palm pre, PalmPre, pre, Today's Chili

According to a report from Advertising Age, Palm has mercifully, finally, really parted ways with its ad agency, Modernista — the house responsible for some of our least favorite ads ever. If you need a memory jog, here’s them telling the world that they loved creeping people out with Palm ads. The AdAge article says that the company is currently in talks with various other ad shops, though there’s no clear word on who that new team will be, or when we’ll see the fruits of their labor. We don’t have much to add to this in commentary except to say that this is probably the second smartest thing Palm has done in a span of seven days — the first was striking that amazing deal on Verizon for a super-cheap Palm Pre Plus along with free Mobile Hotspot service. Now, we can look forward to a future where our children won’t cower in fear when they see a Palm ad on television, and we can sleep at night without the image of that pale woman burned into our minds. Of course, now that we’ve seen it, we can never un-see it.

Palm splits with ad agency Modernista originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Everything Pre  |  sourceAdvertising Age  | Email this | Comments

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Mar 29

Stats: iPhone OS is still king of the mobile web space, but Android is nipping at its heels

Posted in: ads, Android, AndroidOs, Apple, Google, iPhone, mobile internet, mobile os, MobileInternet, MobileOs, RIM, smartphone, Smartphones, statistics, stats, symbian, Today's Chili, web, webos

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US. With the EVO 4G and Galaxy S rapidly approaching, we wouldn’t be surprised by the little green droid stealing away the US share crown, at least until Apple counters with its next slice of magical machinery. Looking at the global stage, Android has also recently skipped ahead of Symbian, with a 24 percent share versus 18 percent for the smartphone leader. Together with BlackBerry OS, Symbian is still the predominant operating system in terms of smartphone sales, but it’s interesting to see both falling behind in the field of web or application usage, which is what this metric seeks to measure. Figures from Net Applications (to be found at the TheAppleBlog link) and ArsTechnica‘s own mobile user numbers corroborate these findings.

Stats: iPhone OS is still king of the mobile web space, but Android is nipping at its heels originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 26

Fan-Made WebOS Commercial Beats Palm’s Efforts

Posted in: ads, Phones, pre, Today's Chili, webos

This fantastic ad for the WebOS comes not from Palm, a company which has proven itself unable to make a compelling commercial for the Pre, but from a fan.

Heiko Thies is the fellow behind this video spot, which manages to be both exciting and slightly edgy. It also totally makes me want to buy a Pre.

The ad does what an ad should, especially when it is for a product as cool and capable as the Pre: It shows the phone in action. The jerky handheld camera is great, too, somehow setting it apart from the superslick iPhone ads.

We expect the shaky-cam made rotoscoping the animations tricky, though. It comes over like a cross between Minority Report and District 9, both great films already.

If Palm aired commercials like these — instead of the creepy lady commercials they ran last year — the company might have a chance of capturing the hearts and minds of geeks everywhere. Of course, it might have to do a few more things to stay alive, as early adopter and Epicenter editor John C. Abell argued last week.

Nice work, Heiko. I’m off to watch it again right now. Palm: Hire this guy right now.

Fan-made ad for Palm webOS by ThiesFX [YouTube via Mashable]


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Mar 25

WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?

Posted in: ad, ads, advertising, Apple, ipad, rumor, tablet, Today's Chili


The Wall Street Journal is running a piece that focuses on ad sales for the iPad. Pretty boring stuff except for a few nuggets related to the actual content we crave. Rupert Murdoch already confirmed that his monument to main stream media was coming to the iPad. Hell, they’ve even been treated to a rare, in-house device to assist with the development of the iPad version of the Wall Street Journal. Now it’s quoting “a person familiar with the matter” (wink) who says that The Journal plans to charge subscribers $17.99 per month for iPad subscriptions — for comparison, the print version of the WSJ costs $349 for 52 weeks or about $29 per month. Not bad, but you can’t roll up an iPad to swat the dog.

Conversely, magazines appear set to offer weekly or monthly editions out of the gate, not annual subscriptions. Sources told the WSJ that the April issue of Hearst’s Esquire magazine (no stranger to new media) will arrive in downloadable format without advertisements for $2.99, $2 less than the newsstand price, and will include five music videos (each containing the phrase “somewhere in Mississippi,” oddly enough) to take advantage of the device’s multimedia capabilities. On the other hand, a full iPad issue of Men’s Health with match the glossy’s $4.99 price. Of course, as we heard earlier, publishers will be experimenting with advertising and pricing models to see what works so expect things to be fluid for quite some time after the April 3rd launch.

WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Mar 2010 04:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 17

PlayStation Move ad pulls no motion-controlled punches against Wii, Project Natal

Posted in: ad, ads, commercial, playstation, playstation 3, Playstation3, ps3, sony, Today's Chili, wii

Sony’s VP of Realistic Movements Kevin Butler (boy, does that guy have a large business card) is at it again, this time in a video ad for the PlayStation Move. He’s back from the future to thank us all for the success of the motion control device, and make a few jabs towards Nintendo and Microsoft for their efforts. Here’s a few choice quotes.

  • “Because real boxers don’t hit like this [flails arms exasperatingly]”
  • “It’s also got what we in the future call buttons, which turn out to be pretty important to those handful of millions of people who enjoy playing shooters, platformers, well, anything that doesn’t involve catching a big red ball.”
  • “C’mon, who wants to pretend their hand is a gun. What is this, third grade? Pew, pew, pew.”

Check out the futuristic — or now-eristic, rather — commercial after the break. And if you ask, sorry, we still wouldn’t bet on Kansas City in six.

Continue reading PlayStation Move ad pulls no motion-controlled punches against Wii, Project Natal

PlayStation Move ad pulls no motion-controlled punches against Wii, Project Natal originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 11

HP rolls out ‘Let’s Do Amazing’ ad campaign

Posted in: ad, ads, HP, Today's Chili
We’d already gotten word of HP’s new $40 million “Let’s Do Amazing” ad campaign earlier today, but the company has just now rolled out its first series of ads to give us some indication of how all that money is being spent. Somewhat curiously, for an ad campaign partly intended to reintroduce the HP brand to consumers, the ads stray pretty far beyond HP’s consumer products (including a trip to a UPS sorting facility and the Venetian’s IT department), but we do at least get to see Dr. Dre extol the benefits of HP Beats audio — not to mention a little beatboxing from Rhys Darby of “Flight of the Conchords,” who serves as the host of the ads. Head on past the break to check out the Dre ad and HP’s introduction video, and hit up the link below for the rest of the series.

Continue reading HP rolls out ‘Let’s Do Amazing’ ad campaign

HP rolls out ‘Let’s Do Amazing’ ad campaign originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 11

Stihl’s autumn calendar automatically rips through to tomorrow

Posted in: ad, ads, advertising, Today's Chili

Unless they’re incredibly quiet or potentially explosive, you won’t find us waxing poetic (or even prosaic) about leaf blowers. But if a company that produced leaf blowers made a motorized calendar that tore off its own pages? We’d tell you about that in a heartbeat — even if the wonderfully wasteful contraption turned out to be a viral ad by agency Euro RSCG rather than an actual household organizer, and even if its pages aren’t nearly as saucy as Stihl’s usual NSFW fare. Believe it or not, there’s no blade inside that brushed aluminum shell; the process works by ripping out the bookbinding thread along the calendar’s spine using a motorized reel. Join us in celebrating the wonder of pressed dead wood floating to earth all by its lonesome with a short video after the break.

Continue reading Stihl’s autumn calendar automatically rips through to tomorrow

Stihl’s autumn calendar automatically rips through to tomorrow originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 08

The First iPad Ad: Brutally Honest Edition [Humor]

Posted in: ads, Apple, Humor, ipad, Today's Chili, top, video

Apple aired its first iPad ad during the Oscars last night, but it felt like something was missing, didn’t it? It was a voiceover. So I went ahead and added one for them. You’re welcome, Apple!

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