T.C. Sottek in a report for The Verge about Nokia's new PureView advertisement:
The opening segment (which, importantly, isn't qualified by a "screen images simulated" notice), shows a young man and woman cheerily riding bikes along a scenic river. As he films her breezily laughing, the ad shows side-by-side video — obviously intended to represent the phone's video capabilities. On the left, Nokia shows the non-stabilized version, which, predictably, looks terrible, and on the right the ad shows the perfectly smooth capture, purportedly enabled by Nokia's optical image stabilization technology. The only problem is that the video is faked.Nokia responded to the criticism with innocence saying that it was "never the company's intention to deceive anyone". Well, any uninformed user would think that the stabilization in the phone really is that good. This incident is really going to hurt Nokia's creditability as a company — filming something with a different camera than is advertised to potential users is dishonest, to say the least. Taking things further, the Windows Phone hardware manufacturer could have gotten in a lawsuit over this if it wasn't pointed out early on; I'm surprised someone caught it so fast.
The alleged real footage that Nokia published in its apology is interestingly unconvincing as well. First off, they edited the video for contrast and color changes which seems unnecessary being as they're trying to show off the stabilization technology and not the color reproduction. Other than that, things in the stabilized video's sky are flickering and the frame is off a good 200 pixels. I'm sure the latter is because they filmed it at a separate instance, but the color has to do with post-processing.
I actually like Nokia's new hardware, but I'll not rely on their advertisements to tell me how good it is. Instead, I'll be the one visiting the carrier's store to hold the device and find out if it's worth my time. I don't think anyone should purchase something on an as-advertised basis.