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Windows Phone 7 Series gets Timotei rinse

Microsoft gets crunchy

Microsoft has airbrushed the Windows Phone 7 Series into a Timotei-style web commercial that glosses over the operating system's limitations.

The company has delivered an ad on YouTube featuring the Anthropologie family of Anna, Miles and Luca - plus the babysitter - smiling, taking photos, playing games and casually flipping through endless screens of messages and Facebook pages on phones that all run Windows Phone 7 Series. You can see the ad that played at Microsoft's Mix10 here.

The ad comes complete with strumming guitar, because nothing says earthy and wholesome like a guitar - right?

Unfortunately, the capabilities of Windows Phone 7 Series are about as far removed from reality as the solar-powered 30-something family Microsoft has manufactured to hype the phone.

The local storage capabilities and ability for applications to run in the background as the user juggles multiple actions implied in Microsoft's ad will be missing "in this release".

Meanwhile, it seems, Microsoft has sacrificed Adobe Systems' Flash that powers so much online content on the phone in order to get Windows Phone 7 Series out the door for its first release. Let's hope Anna and her post-nuclear, nine grain–munching family weren't hoping to catch any YouTube videos on their Windows phones.

As for the ad itself, it follows Apple's iPhone and Palm's earlier Pre ads, the latter of which played up the scrolling screen idea using the scary bun-haired woman in an ever so slightly surreal, bright but sunless orchard. The use of large displays floating over the top of the handset, meanwhile, borrows from Verizon's TV "There's a map for that" attack on AT&T in the US.

Let's hope the phone's capabilities catch up to the ads while the ads do more than say Microsoft is offering what everyone else already has in ways that don't copy others. ®

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