Video of the Day: New Motorola ads prove how real our smartphone addiction is

Motorola teamed up with Ashton Kutcher on a series of new commercials that showcase how dependent we are on our phones. The segments, which are a portion of Kutcher’s larger campaign with a company called #PhoneLove, feature him in an experiment that challenges subjects to sit in a room and not look at their phones.

Participants were asked to sit alone in a square cubicle facing a large mirror with their hands placed on a transparent tabletop. Their mobile phones were placed in between their hands on the table with the screens facing down. Kutcher then baited the participants with texts and calls and observed the duration of time before they picked up the device. The average participant lasted just a few minutes.

“I think the phone has almost become the new refrigerator,” Kutcher said. “We've all had that experience where we go to our refrigerator and open up the door and we stand there and look inside and then we close the door without ever taking anything out.”

Rather than criticizing the smartphone obsession, Motorola wishes to lend out a hand. The commercial advertises the Moto X Pure smartphone with an added hands free feature that reads your texts back to you so you don’t have to keep your eyes on the smartphone screen. The phone boasts all-day battery life and can get up to 10 extra hours in just 15 minutes with a special TurboPower charging cord, according to Motorola. It comes equipped with 4K video, a 21MP rear camera, 3GB LPDDR3 of RAM memory, Bluetooth version 4.1 LE, and a Micro SD card that supports up to 128GB. The phone also has a water repellent nano-coating.

Among the other campaigns are ones that test smartphone addiction by asking questions such as, “Would you rather go a day without your phone or text your ex that you’re thinking about them?” Most didn’t want to go a day without their smartphones.

Kutcher previously portrayed Steve Jobs in a movie about the Apple’s CEO and his current deal with Motorola is an effort to focus on the company’s smartphone business. 

“People are trying to turn their phones into almost like a Swiss army knife, that this one device can do everything. But the problem with that is it compromises the user experience in a lot of ways,” he said.

Source: Mashable