Oh Nokia, once the darling of the mobile industry and now everyone’s whipping boy. The company can’t seem to catch a break, and this week’s highly anticipated launch of new Windows Phone handsets hasn’t gone smoothly. Even having Steve Ballmer, who’s famous for his gravitas at launches *cough*, couldn’t stop a huge dive in share price post-Lumia news.

That said, Nokia isn’t doing itself any favours with its PR and marketing content. A video shown at the Lumia launch supposedly captured footage using Nokia’s optical image stabilisation (OIS) technology on the new phone. Sadly, it turns out the video was actually shot on an SLR camera.

The video features two actors on cycles riding side by side while one films the other on a Nokia phone. A wide shot at the opening of the video shows the phone, then cuts to a supposed in-camera shot of the second rider being filmed. It follows on with a trip to a funfair and an impromptu photo shoot in the street. Lovely.

However, an eagle eyed reporter on The Verge spotted a reflection towards the end of the video clearly showing a guy holding what looks like an SLR camera riding in a van. At no point did the video display a disclaimer about the nature of the footage, although the YouTube version now does.

Having been caught out, Nokia posted a blog post to apologise. What’s more amazing is Nokia had a perfectly good genuine video that could have used, which has been published with the apology. Says the blog, “Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but we should have posted a disclaimer stating this was a representation of OIS only. This was not shot with a Lumia 920. At least, not yet. We apologise for the confusion we created.”

Which is all well and good, but one wonders if ‘an apology would be due’ if they hadn’t been caught out. Hindsight is 20/20, but you don’t need perfect vision to see the video cut is highly misleading.

@simonhill