The biggest news at the Mobile World Congress has been, without a shadow of a doubt, the unveiling of Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft’s brand spanking new OS, which finally puts old Windows Mobile to bed, and goes off on a bigger tangent than René Descartes (did I just do a maths joke? I think I did). Once it was unveiled, one question that immediately popped into a lot of people’s heads was: will the HTC HD2 get an official update to Windows Phone 7 Series?
Well, certainly the specs of the HD2 are good enough for it to run 7 Series; it’s got the minimum system spec that Microsoft demands for every 7 Series phone. But the question is whether it will get an upgrade.
Well, today, the possibility became a little bit more likely, thanks to WinMo.nl (Google-translated link)… or, should I say, provided the picture they’ve turned up isn’t an out-and-out fake, then the possibility of it happening has gotten a bit more likely.
However, I should point out that this story is entirely supposition; one thing about photos is that they’re very, very, very easy to fake.
That said, what we have here is an image that purportedly shows Windows Phone 7 Series running on the HTC HD2, with the distinctive ‘live tile’ start screen. However, we should remind ourselves that it probably isn’t genuine; new 7 Series phones have a minimum button requirement of three keys, and they have to be Start, Search and Back. The HD2 has Back and Start sorted, but it’s got a Home key instead of a Search key. So, even if they remapped the keys, it still wouldn’t have the search icon on the key, and I have to wonder whether Microsoft would be happy about that. Plus, if they’re so intent on this being a clean break with the past, do you reckon they’ll let manufacturers put 7 Series on their old phones?
No, me neither. However… that’s not to say that the modding community might not do it. After all, the HD2 does hit the minimum spec requirement for 7 Series, so there’s no technical reason why it couldn’t run the new OS. And it’s got that home key that could be remapped as the search key. So, while the jury is still out on whether the HD2 will get an official software upgrade (my money’s on HTC making a new version of the phone, specifically for Windows Phone 7 Series, rather than porting the OS to the current version), I’d put good money on some enterprising modder porting the new OS across…
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