14 DAY TRIAL // As we already reported several times in the last couple of weeks, the Windows phone community is hard at work to keep Microsoft’s mobile operating system alive not necessarily using the typical ways of developing apps and begging for the company to keep shipping updates, but with more unconventional methods.
Several skilled developers tried (and apparently managed) to install other Windows versions, originally created for PCs or tablets, on Windows phones, and one such example is Twitter user @imbushuo.
As you can see in the photos included in this article, what he did was install Windows RT on a Lumia 640, and by the looks of things, the operating system appears to be running just fine, with full desktop and Start screen support.
Sure, Windows RT itself was a flop and is no longer getting any new features, but this certainly opens the door to more projects that would eventually keep Windows phones around for a little bit longer, at least for experimental ideas like this one.
More information in the coming days
While judging from the pics Windows RT seems to be rendered correctly on the small screen of the Lumia 640, the developer says more information will be provided in the coming days, including how he actually managed to install the operating system in the first place.
“You need to be familiar with ACPI(reading table sources), UEFI, Windows Phone partition, Windows deployment stages, Windows Driver Development, Windows Kernel Debugging and patient,” he said in a follow-up tweet. “For end users, they probably can flash it via a customized FFU once everything is validated.”
As I said before, Windows phones do not benefit from such experiments for the time being, but researchers and developers can find other ways to help the community if these projects succeed. For example, work is now under way on bringing back Project Astoria and even install full Android on Windows phones, though don’t get your hopes too high for the moment because such things are not accomplished overnight.
