Whats the point of muddying the waters without having verifiable facts? The thing with speculation is .. anyone can speculate, on anything, for any reason. That doesn't make it true.
>I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules.
Who exactly said that?
Look at the quote at the beginning of this thread.
If it looks like an ad, if it reads unnaturally, like something no real person would say to convey a honest opinion, then it's most likely an ad.
I read the post and it read fairly naturally to me. There are a wide variety of people out there who communicate differently.
Given the date of the post, time to write it up, and time to take the pictures this phone is in the hands of something before the official release date.
I read this like I read something from John Gruber about something Apple.
Second, this wouldn't be the first time someone did a paid promotion without noting it was paid. I don't know anything about this guy, so I'm not accusing him of anything. I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules. (See game streamers and their odd tendency to open tons of 'loot boxes' on stream & get significantly better results than expected.)
Finally a lot of the copy reads like it's straight from a press release, with capitalized words and everything.
Whether it's enough to constitute an ad in a regulatory sense, I don't know. But you can be advertised to without the source being a literal ad according to a legal definition.