Heroes and Sprint: Product Placement Gone Wrong
I was catching up on my viewing of Heroes this evening when I noticed a rather obvious product placement for Sprint. The product placement doesn’t bother me so much, it’s the fact that anyone who knows anything about mobile phone networks would realize that this product placement is unrealistic.
Sprint uses CDMA technology to provide service. Just about everywhere else in the world uses GSM, including in Cork, Ireland, where the pictured scene was taking place. Granted, Sprint does sell GSM phones, including some Nokia ones, surprisingly enough. The fact is, most Sprint phones you can easily buy won’t work in Ireland, or anywhere else outside of North America for that matter.
This product placement fails spectacularly due to the lack of realism, though I suppose Sprint can technically do what is being shown here. If the company doing the placement was AT&T or T-Mobile, it would have been a lot more believable. AT&T specifically advertises their International roaming capabilities. T-Mobile, while they don’t specifically make a point of advertising it, will roam internationally quite well thanks to it’s GSM-based technology.
Am I being too much of a geek by bringing this up? What do you think?
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Tags: cdma, gsm, heroes, product placement, sprint Fnord
Comment by Aaron Huslage
Too geeky, but CDMA is widely used outside of North America. India, China, S. Korea and Japan are very big consumers of the technology.
Comment by PhoneBoy
But they don’t use CDMA in Europe, which is my point. And on the whole, GSM has far bigger market share than CDMA. At least outside of North America, CDMA actually uses SIM cards (or rather U-RIM cards).
Comment by Darren Jones
Nope, not too geeky. It was really obvious to me that it was product placement and then I thought “isn’t Sprint non-GSM”, and found out that it is. Obviously not the end of the world, but stuff like that just seems poor. OK, we’re talking about a program where people can fly and regenerate, but there’s no need to go TOO FAR with phone stuff that’s simply unreal!
Comment by PhoneBoy
There’s plausible and then there’s unreal. CDMA phones don’t work on GSM, I don’t care what kind of black magic you might have.
Comment by george
Just saw the episode with this shameful product placement and thought the same thing, but searching for sprint and roaming came up with this
http://support.sprint.com/sprinthelp/help/help128.html
Looks like they will give you a ’special’ phone and sim if you ask.
Comment by brendan
i’m not gonna lie, the product placement pretty much killed me. but yeah, i agree that it’s kinda crap though.
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