The marketing prowess of Apple Inc. is legendary, a reputation that was bolstered again Tuesday by a slick 30-minute online video that offers a guided tour of the iPhone 3G coming July 11.

The video is much longer than a previous video that appeared for the first-generation iPhone a year ago, but features the same narrator, Bob Borchers. Borchers is not a professional actor, as many have thought, but is the senior director of the Apple iPhone product line.

Borchers, wearing the collarless black shirt commonplace with Apple presenters, describes a wide array of product features without much specific emphasis on what is new to the iPhone 3G. Still, he makes it clear that using a faster 3G network, one of the major added features in the new iPhone, will help users in downloading Web pages and video.

Some of the focus of the tour is on potential business users, so the video shows the capabilities of visual voice mail for picking through long lists of voice mails by the sender's name and using a simple touch to listen to a voice mail recording. Push e-mail capabilities and quick navigation of long e-mail inboxes, are also explained. Photos attached to e-mails appear next to the text without the need to open an attachment, Borchers explains.

Some of the material covered in the video is specific, such as showing the ways a user trains to use the touch keyboard, which can change size depending on the application. A theme throughout is personalization of the device, including the ability to customize icons on each of nine different possible home pages. The presentation is like a video instruction manual at times, designed to help potential buyers visualize how they might use the device, analysts said.

Analysts said the video is unusual in smart phone marketing. It is also distinctive because, at 30 minutes, it is lengthy and intimate, with a narrator talking directly at the audience, with up-close demonstrations of how an application works. Many other cell phone makers and cell phone carriers have elaborate marketing campaigns and offer users the ability to hold and try out phones in their stores before making a purchase, but the video shows how far Apple is willing to go, analysts said.

To say Apple is good at marketing is an understatement, said analyst Ken Dulaney at Gartner Inc. "They are awesome at this," he said and called the guided-tour video part of a "very effective" overall campaign designed to lure customers.

"No one does services, hardware, software and marketing to the degree of excellence of Apple in one single organization," he added.

Jeff Kagan, an independent analyst in Atlanta, noted that there are "countless" numbers of phone models introduced by carriers each year, but only a few devices are given much of a marketing push. The Sprint Instinct by Samsung has had a strong marketing push in advance of initial sales in June, although the campaign did not include a similar online video.

"Apple does [marketing] bigger than everyone else," Kagan said. "They take it to the next level."

Apple is helped by virtue of selling only one phone model "and can afford to focus on marketing and create demand," he added. "Thirty minutes for a video might seem like a lot, but then again, Apple does a great job at marketing."

The longer video portends an impressive launch on July 11, Kagan said, even though imitators have launched competitive touch-screen smart phones in the past few months.

"Apple has learned what worked and what should be corrected," Kagan said. "This year's introduction could be hot again."

If you're the sort of person who creates countdown widgets for major Apple product releases, you've now got an official Zero Hour for the iPhone 3G launch, straight from AT&T. The exclusive iPhone service provider in the U.S. says that the latest version of the iPhone will go on sale at 8 a.m. local time on Friday, July 11.

The July 11 ship date had been set by Apple during Steve Jobs' Worldwide Developers Conference keynote last month, but the exact time of the release was still up in the air. AT&T made the announcement amid detailing the pricing plans for the iPhone 3G.

"We can't wait to offer iPhone 3G to our customers, and we want to make sure the buying process is as easy as possible,” Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T's wireless unit, said in the press release announcing the 8 a.m. launch.

The early-morning release is something of a departure from recent high-profile Apple product launches. The company tends to roll out major products—the kind that generate lines of customers—at the end of the day. Last year, the original iPhone went on sale at 6 p.m. local time, as did Leopard, when the Mac OS X update debuted last fall.

An 8 a.m. release time would mean a chance to the operating hours of Apple Stores, which typically open at 10 a.m. Macworld called the flagship Apple Store on San Francisco's Stockton Street to find out if the store would open at 8 a.m. on July; an employee there said the store wasn't revealing that information at this time, but suggested calling back later.

Because it requires in-store activation, the iPhone 3G is available only at brick-and-mortar Apple Stores and AT&T outlets in the U.S.