Microsoft showed off its upcoming Windows Phone OS at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain today, and showed the video teaser above onstage. Without ever mentioning the iPhone, it completely trashes it and all the other copycat touch phones that are following in its wake.
The narrator laments the “Sea of Sameness” that smartphones have fallen into, with each new phone “‘just a slightly better version than the one before it.” Then it tries to undermine the iPhone’s greatest strength: the 150,000 apps on its platform. The video positions the problem as a “focus on apps over the phone experience itself” and points out how “current smartphones make you to use them one at a time—in and out, and onto the next app, then the next, and the next, rarely working together.” It illustrates this with a woman in a labyrinth opening up doors labeled with different app icons (can you find the Foursquare check mark?). Of course, the iPhone the major smartphone that still doesn’t run multiple apps in the background—Android and Palm, for instance, do.
It’s easy to talk trash when you are losing market share. But will Windows Phone turn things around for Microsoft on the mobile front? Here’s another video MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak took of a Windows Phone in action.