Huawei Busted For Faking Smartphone Selfie With A DSLR

There is still no smartphone available in the market that can give a camera quality of a full-sized DSLR. So Huawei found a solution to this — just simply fake it.

Huawei is catching up with popularity as many people are switching to their smartphones. Unfortunately, the company still needs a lot of work when it comes to its marketing and advertising campaigns.

Huawei Mobile Egypt launched a new advertisement for its Nova 3 smartphone. The selfie snaps in the ad clearly look a bit too good to be true. As it turns out, they actually are.

The issue came to light when the actress in the advertisement shared a behind-the-scenes photo from the Nova 3 ad shoot on social media. Eagle-eyed netizens then noticed one major detail — there was no phone!

In the ad, the couple takes an array of selfies, and each picture is shown on screen as a snapshot of the moment. The images were so crisp that it’s almost as if it had been touched in post-processing.

The behind-the-scenes snap, however, clearly showed that the actor was faking the shot. In fact, it was so fake that he wasn’t even holding a phone while taking the selfie.

It was then realized that the Chinese smartphone giant was caught passing off DSLR photos as examples of what its smartphone camera can do. Instead of the Nova 3 smartphone front camera, the ad creators clearly used a DSLR camera.

The actress who shared the behind-the-scenes footage took the picture down, but a Redditor was fast enough to capture the post.

Android Police writes:

“[‘T]he reality of the matter is that the general public — the main audience for this ad — will absolutely think that the Nova 3 is capable of such feats, and this could very well be the deciding factor for many to go out and buy one … This was clearly meant to be misleading, and the fact that Huawei was attempting to demonstrate a feature of the Nova 3, not just the image quality, makes this even more deceptive.”

As word of Huawei’s deception spread, the video on YouTube began to be flooded with negative ratings and critical comments. Now, Huawei says that the ad never outright claims that the picture was shot on a Nova 3. If that is the case, then the concept of the ad is very misleading.

Watch the video here: