The Immortal Phone: Windows Phone 8 Gets Ported to HTC HD2

 

Russian developer Cotulla has managed to port Windows Phone 8 to HTC’s HD2, adding yet another OS to the legendary smartphone’s collection — which already included Windows Mobile 6.5 (which it originally shipped with), all versions of Windows Phone 7.x (7, 7.5, 7.8), most versions of Android, Ubuntu, other Linux distributions, and Meego,

Cotulla tweeted some images of WP8 running on his HD2, then chimed in on an XDA-Developers thread:

For now it’s actually just a proof of concept.
I honestly dunno how far it can goes forward; a lot of problems appear and not sure will be it’s possible to solve them.
And not only to solve them, but get an acceptable user experience 🙂

It was implied as “a crazy experiment” at the start up time 😀

For now it’s implemented only few functionality like SD card, screen output, touch screen input.
All other things are not working. I won’t add “YET” it can be very hard to get some things to work.
and DFT didn’t yet decided about future developments in that direction.

Performance seems to be one of the biggest challenges.  WP8 is based on Windows NT, which is much heavier than WP7.x’s WinCE roots, and possibly too much for the HD2’s three-year-old internals to handle smoothly.

But Cotulla’s results could answer a few questions: first, was Microsoft justified in not upgrading any WP7.x devices to WP8?  Second, as Microsoft — particularly through Nokia — heads downmarket with WP7.x phones like the Lumia 510, will WP8 be a viable option for entry-level smartphone hardware anytime soon?