Did you feel disappointed when you came to know that your HTC HD2 was announced as not being upgradable to Windows Phone 7 for the first time? Or maybe when Windows Mobile 2003 was said to not be upgradable to Windows Mobile 5?
Now the problem is back as it has been officially declared that Windows Phone 8 will not be supported on current Windows Phone 7.5 devices. But is that the final verdict? Now if you remember carefully, Windows Phone 7 was successfully ported to the old HTC HD2 (courtesy some creative hackers and the xda-developer community), just as Windows Mobile 5 was ported to older Windows Mobile 2003/2002 devices such as the XDA II (this was done even though it was said to not be possible due to hardware differences).
Judging by the previous experiences and going through the history, it is actually pretty wrong, as well as early, to say that Windows Phone 8 will never be ported to older hardware in the similar manner. And if we have learned anything from the past, we should know that there is bound to be some kind of custom ROMs that will bring Windows Phone 8 to older devices.
Let’s take Android for example. If you’re an Android user, you would probably rely greatly on the hacker community for operating system updates, although you might not know as to how long it would take for the latest version of Android to officially come to current Android phones that were not mentioned as supporting Jelly Bean in the latest Google Android 4.1 announcement.
But, in reality, you would wait for the hacker community to release some kind of update for a version of Android 4.1 that might someday be compatible with that device, rather than tagging your current device (let’s say Samsung Galaxy S3) as outdated.
Only recently, we came across some evidence that Microsoft may have been testing Windows Phone 8 on the old HTC HD7 and HTC Surround as shown by WMPowerUser. This indicated that there isn’t really a huge technical issue in getting the unreleased OS to run on older hardware, although you could expect a tad bit of performance problems. Moreover, you can’t expect hardware-related features like NFC, high-resolution screens, etc. to arrive on older phones due to lack of required hardware.
According to Adam Lein of Pocketnow, the biggest issue with upgrading older hardware to Windows Phone 8 is probably implementing it using the current upgrade mechanism in the Zune desktop software. Lein believes that this is where the technical problems lie.
“Since Windows Phone 8 is using the Windows 8 core, that means it’s using a different architecture and a different file system. All of your current apps and app data will not be readable in the state they’re in right now. You’ll have to re-download apps that have been compiled for the new operating system and re-sync everything from scratch, and that’s really not a consumer-friendly process for an automatic upgrade,” Lein further explained. “It sure sounds like a lot of work for Microsoft to create some kind of software that manages that kind of transition as well. Given that, it seems clear that it’s not worth it for Microsoft to support an upgrade path that’s easy for users since it would be way too complicated to develop.”
Only time will tell how long we may have to wait for a custom ROM to arrive to make Windows Phone 8 compatible for older devices.
