New Verizon ad features new Xoom 2?
A curious new Verizon ad promises that it will set your tablet free. The only question is whether the tablet featured in the ad might be a new Xoom.
So here's an Angelina Jolie look-alike clutching what just might be a Xoom 2 look-alike.
At least that's the impression some wise commenters on YouTube seem to have obtained from a new ad posted yesterday by Verizon.
This, for some, might be cause for excitement. The original Xoom was slightly expensive and didn't seem to offer quite the same creature comforts as the iPad--especially if the creature happened to be human.
Moreover, it was launched with advertising that laid a hefty dollop of nonsense onto an unsuspecting Super Bowl audience. Perhaps you remember it. It was the one that told you Apple was now Big Brother, while Motorola's Xoom was the new, um, flower power. Or something.
This new Verizon ad is a curious affair.
A house appears to be exploding. Meanwhile, the Angelina Jolie look-alike, perhaps reaching for the heights of her performance in "Salt," is coolly standing in the middle of her expensive abode.
She is clutching this new machine, which is identifiable only by its Verizon logo but has certain Xoomish qualities.
It is, indeed, she who is causing all the doors to fly off their hinges and the windows to shatter. Why? Because she has five bars on her mystery machine.
Just as you are wondering what Aaron Sorkin would feel about this narrative logic, a voice intones: "The one network powerful enough to set your tablet free."
Aha. The network is so powerful that you turn on your tablet and your house begins to explode with, well, the power and freedom of it all.
Is this merely an ad for the Verizon network? Did the producers dress up an old Xoom, just to offer a little promise of the future? Or is the thing in Angelina's mitt the tablet that will finally, um, kill--or at least graze--the iPad?
Are the windows of your mind already shattering?