Smartphone manufacturers need to stop marketing inaccurate product renders

The purpose of marketing material is to boast about the features and advantages of a product. Especially for mobile gadgets like smartphones and laptops, we love reading and seeing what OEMs have to offer year after year. When certain ads start bending the truth, however, they risk walking into false advertisement territory.

An agitating trend that we're seeing more often involves product shots or digital renders of smartphones. Namely, some OEMs have a habit of showing product renders with narrower bezels than in actuality. These "faux" pictures are seemingly more common from Chinese smartphone manufacturers than others based on our experience researching and reviewing over a dozen smartphones each month.

The egregious example that prompted us to open such a discussion is the digital render of the UMIDIGI S2 Lite smartphone. Our photo below compares the actual UMIDIGI S2 Lite on the left with the marketing render on the right. Not only are the bezels thicker along the sides of the real device, but the screen is shorter as well. Needless to say, we'd much rather have the smartphone on the right as promised by the original marketing.

OEMs might be able to get away with inaccurate renders by explaining through a disclaimer that the renders are merely an approximation of the retail device. However, such a message would essentially defeat the main purpose of a render. The practice of producing faux digital renders with eye-catching narrow bezels has already made its way to monitors, but laptops are fortunately the exception for the time being.

If you've ever run into or suspected a faux product shot, feel free to share them in the comments below. If something looks too good to be true, then it just might be.

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