14 DAY TRIAL // Even though Windows phones no longer seem to have a future, recent experimental projects have shown that there are many ways to keep them away from the outdated device box.
One of them is installing the full version of Windows 10, which at this point doesn’t provide the full functionality, but which at some moment could evolve into something a lot more useful.
In the last couple of months, we’ve seen several skilled developers who managed to install either Windows RT or the ARM version of Windows 10 on various Lumia models, and now here comes a project that again makes people dream about a potential Surface Phone.
Screenshots posted on Twitter by @WebberGuo (via WL) show Windows 10 ARM64 (Windows Server 2016) installed on what appears to be a Windows phone prototype that many diehards hoped to see going live.
Enter Lumia Hapanero
This is the Lumia RX-130, also known as Lumia Hapanero, which was used by Microsoft for demoing its mobile vision at the Build developer conference in 2015. The device eventually made it to the market as Lumia 950, but without many key features of the prototype, like the support for Surface Pen.
As for how useful installing Windows 10 on a Lumia phone actually is, there’s not much you can do because the OS itself isn’t yet optimized to be used on mobile devices and work in this regard is still in its early days.
The simple thing that you can do that, however, shows that there’s room for improvements, and thanks to the skilled developer community that’s looking into keeping Windows phones alive, such projects could evolve substantially in the long term.
The only hope right now is that all the info pointing to a Surface Phone coming this year is indeed true, though for the time being Microsoft has remained completely tight-lipped on how it sees its strategy in terms of mobile hardware in the next years.
