By AppleInsider Staff

Published: 09:20 AM EST (06:20 AM PST)

Motorola has continued its assault on the iPhone with a new commercial that indirectly compares Apple's handset to a "tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen."

The new commercial for the Motorola Droid, entitled "Pretty," debuted on TV this week. Thought it never specifically names the iPhone, it does show images of people admiring an iPhone-like device, albeit with concave sides. In one brief shot, a blonde woman holds a white mock iPhone in front of her as she crosses a street and applies lip gloss, with the word "princess" laid across the screen.

"It's not a princess, it's a robot," the commercial says of the Droid. "A phone that trades hair-do for can-do."

The advertisement also calls the Droid "fast -- racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast." Clearly geared toward a male audience, it also states that the handset "does rip through the Web like a circular saw through a ripe banana," accompanied by footage of a destroyed fruit.

Motorola's advertising blitz focused on men could be working. At least one recent study found that men of ages 18-and-up have shown increased interest in Motorola while buzz about Apple has decreased.



View the new commercial in its entirety:



Both Motorola and Verizon have stepped up advertising to hype the Droid, which launched in October. The first ad campaign also directly targeted Apple, lampooning its commercial style with the tagline "iDon't." The TV spot, which teased the then-impending launch of the Droid, attacked the iPhone's lack of a physical keyboard, inability to multitask with third-party applications, and absence of a camera flash.

The Motorola Droid is the first handset on the Verizon network to utilize Google's Android mobile operating system. Tension built over the last few months between Verizon and AT&T, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the U.S., as Verizon began to run a series of advertisements mocking Apple's "There's an app for that" slogan with the tagline "There's a map for that," comparing 3G coverage maps of the two companies. The dispute led to a lawsuit from AT&T, which was dropped this week.