Officially speaking, HTC’s HD2 will not be getting a Windows Phone 7 upgrade. All because it doesn’t comply with WP7’s hardware specifications. And what hardware specs, you might ask? Not having three buttons! Yes, HD2 won’t get WP7 all because it has two extra buttons despite the fact that it meets all other specifications.
Wow! this is big! We all knew this was going to happen at some point, but not as soon as this. Apparently, some Russian folks have managed to port a “real” working ROM of Windows Phone 7 on the most popular Windows Mobile device – the HTC HD2. Tom Codon of HTCPedia has posted screenshots which shows off the device running an early build of Windows Phone OS 7.0.
Dan Ardelean of Mobile Development blog has managed to unlock the full experience in the pre-released ROM of Windows Phone OS 7.0 which shipped earlier this week with the development tools for Windows Phone 7 Series. The original ROM as released by Microsoft only allowed access to the web browser (Internet Explorer) and “Settings” but with this hacked .BIN file, you can get access to entire Windows Phone 7 Series experience that Microsoft didn't want you to see.
Folks over at XDA-Developers have dumped the Windows Phone 7 ROM Build 7.0.0.6077 off the PC Emulator software, which was released with dev tools at MIX10 yesterday. This marks the beginning of a long journey for XDA-devs to port this next-gen OS from Microsoft to the current-gen of Windows phone devices.
Jaxbot at XDA-Developers forums is working hard on a Windows Phone 7 Series theme to bring the Metro UI over to Windows Mobile 6.5.x (aka Windows Phone Starter) based devices. The said UI is still in very early stages of development, and has some bugs as can be expected but it promises a lot. Here is how it currently looks like running on a HTC HD2.
