A couple of years ago, several companies including Huawei and ASUS have begun entertained the idea of building and releasing dual-boot smart devices featuring two operating systems – Windows Phone OS and Android OS – out of the box. Needless to say, the dual-boot concept never really took off, and reportedly both Google and Microsoft have opposed this endeavor for reasons that are not officially known. Nevertheless, the idea of dual-boot smartphones (or tablets) hasn’t died off entirely, and occasionally a new story on dual-boot smart devices emerges, reminding us that some developers haven’t abandoned the idea completely. Such is the case with a new and rather mysterious YouTube video published yesterday, which shows an LG Nexus 5X running Windows 10 as opposed to Android OS.
Although Microsoft doesn’t seem to have any immediate plans for making Windows 10 an open mobile OS available for non-Windows smartphones, some third party developers seem to have been able and ported Windows 10 on the LG Nexus 5X. There are no details as to how the developer managed to install Windows 10 on the aforementioned Android device, and no Windows 10 ROM for the said model has been made available. With that being said, while the video shows what looks to be a perfectly-working Nexus 5X running Windows 10, there really isn’t much to tell regarding the origin of the video, or when and if an unofficial Windows 10 ROM for the LG Nexus 5X will be launched in the future.
In any case, the Nexus 5X seems to be a perfect candidate for an unofficial Windows 10 ROM, as it shares the same SoC with the Microsoft Lumia 950, namely the Qualcomm MSM8992 Snapdragon 808 chipset featuring four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.44 GHz each, and an additional dual-core Cortex-A57 CPU operating at frequencies of up to 1.82 GHz. It also packs the same Adreno 418 graphics chip, but the Nexus 5X relies on 2 GB of RAM, whereas the Microsoft Lumia 950 boasts 3 GB of RAM instead. It’s also worth noting that although the Nexus 5X featured in the video runs Windows 10, there’s no clear evidence to suggest that Android OS was retained in a true dual-OS fashion. It’s just a likely that the phone no longer has Android OS on-board and relies solely on the unofficial Windows 10 port.