Student gets Windows 11 running on a Windows Phone
5Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/1/22558999/microsoft-windows-11-windows-phone-port-developer-engineer
Reported today in The Verge.
Student gets Windows 11 running on a Windows Phone
The Windows 11 preview only got released earlier this week, but a student has already managed to get Microsoft's latest operating system running on a Windows Phone. Engineering student Gustave Monce has created a brief video demonstrating Windows 11 running on a Lumia 950 XL, one of the first devices to ship with Windows 10 Mobile. It was also one of Microsoft's last Windows-powered phones before the company ended support for its mobile OS.
Windows 11 adapts surprisingly well for the 5.7-inch display, but the same can't be said for the speed of animations. While Windows 11 is usable on the Lumia 950 XL, it doesn't look like something you'd want to pull out of your pocket every day. But that's not really the point. This is the latest achievement in a five-year hobby of tinkering with getting full versions of Windows running on Windows Phone devices.
"It all started really 5 years ago, when Windows 10 Mobile was near obsolescence," says Monce, speaking to The Verge. Monce teamed up with Bingxing Wang, a fellow engineer, to bring the idea of running full Windows on these phones to life.
"As time went on and we started talking about it, discussion groups formed and in turn we had a community of people interested in running full Windows 10 on Lumia 950s," explains Monce. "We're now basically a team of about 15 people, and we've made a lot of progress."
The team has ported and reverse-engineered drivers to get Windows 11 running on a Windows Phone and even written their own ones, too. "I wouldn't say we were quite fast to do it, we took four years to get to the current state, but it's actually impressive we got here with not much documentation on hand," says Monce. "Because of all that work for W