WINDOWS 95 MOBILE Imagines What Smartphones Would Have Been Like in the ’90s

Is your phone operating too slowly, even after you’ve closed all 48 apps you had running in the background?

If that didn’t do the trick, what’s your next course of action? Try restarting your phone, get a new one, ignore the issue, or just lower your expectations? Maybe the solution isn’t an upgrade, but a downgrade! Russian animator 4096 mocked up a prototype of a smartphone version of the classic Windows 95 operating system, and I have to say that it looks pretty slick (via Tastefully Offensive).

The clip is presented like a product reveal video, and it shows off the neat features that you would expect from “Microsoft Windows 95 Mobile”: You can check your Internet Mail, set pixelated wallpapers, compose documents with Word 97, use Internet Explorer (although it doesn’t even work in the demo video), record sounds, and download apps. They even included Clippy, who in this version of Windows 95 serves as an Alexa-like assistant. The good news is that with modern mobile networks, your download and browsing speeds might be faster than the five kilobytes per second you got over dial-up!

Would you give this mobile OS a go? Does this give you any other ideas of what platforms you’d like to see dreamed up as in a mobile version? Off the top of my head, I’m thinking the Nintendo Wii, since its interface was so clean-looking and had killer background music. If that’s too dumb for your taste (which would be fair), come up with something better down in the comments!

Featured image: 4096/YouTube