Windows Phone is dead and buried. But enthusiasts are keeping that mobile OS alive with their hacks and experiments. This latest one has the Lumia 950 XL rocking Windows 11.
Or a version thereof.
Public demand led Gustave Monce, a well-known Windows Phone hacker from France has published a short video that shows the upcoming operating system running on the final flagship phone that Microsoft launched under the Lumia brand.
The famed hacker managed to get an ARM64 build of Windows 11 working on the nearly six-year-old handset after about a day’s work.
And the result is quite impressive:
The video doesn’t show all there is, but screenshots are available here that show Windows 11 running on the smartphone.
Obviously, Windows 11 was not designed to work on 5.7-inch phone with outdated specs, but the OS looks pretty much usable. The transition from portrait to landscape mode usually takes a couple of seconds to happen, but this is par for the course.
Monce even managed to make calls, even though Windows 11 doesn’t ship with a phone stack. This was done by leveraging the Windows Phone component that is used for handling calls.
Pretty fun to see Windows Phone hackers trying to breathe new life into the last phone Microsoft released.
This is a phone sporting a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor all the way back from 2015. On the topic of specifications, Redmond recently confirmed that Windows 11 will not officially be supported on Qualcomm SoCs older than Snapdragon 850 from 2018.
This pretty much also means that first-generation Windows on ARM PCs powered by the older Snapdragon 835 will not be upgradable to Windows 11 when it hits store shelves.
