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Windows 8 on the HTC Shift

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Do you remember the HTC shift? No? The HTC Shift was a very interesting handset; this was a piece of kit that came loaded with 2 different operating systems and a 7 inch Active TFT touch screen. The two operating systems were Windows Vista (for use in notebook mode) and SnapVUE (a stripped down version of Windows Mobile, for PDA mode).

The device came with two processors; an Intel A110 Stealey CPU clocked at 800 MHz for Vista and an ARM11 CPU for SnapVUE.  All in all the device worked quite well and was more than capable of doing everything you needed, especially having the ability to switch over to Vista and do some real computing work.

Released back in 2008, some would think that 3 years later the handset is dead, that there will be no reason to think about a 3 year old device.Well, over at XDA a developer has managed to get the unsupported pre-beta version (developer version) of windows 8 to work on a HTC Shift!

He has also given full instructions on how to do this yourself if you still have one of these lying around. The Dev was surprised how smooth the OS was on the device, considering it is below the minimum specifications needed for Windows 8.

The steps are pretty easy and the developer himself states that it was mainly a case of installing the drivers in the correct order.  You can follow the instructions here if you want to give it a go.

It never ceases to amaze me what can be done with our portable devices, do the developer and manufacturers of them realise the potential of what they are building?

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