While Microsoft has discontinued the Lumia brand, and no new phones are coming, a couple of years ago the company tested a Lumia 950 prototype with Surface Pen support and some other interesting features. The Lumia prototype in question appears to be the “Lumia Hapanero,” a prototype that never came to the market.
As you already know, Microsoft has confirmed that there will be no further development on Windows 10 Mobile and the platform is dead, however, the talented developers are still experimenting with the current and unreleased Lumia handset. The highly-skilled developer Gustave M recently managed to boot Windows 10 on ARM on Lumia Hapanero, and installed Google Chrome/Chromium.
A couple of days ago, Gustave installed Google Chrome on Lumia Hapanero powered by Windows 10 on ARM operating system. Gustave has posted some convincing evidence on Twitter of Google Chrome on a Lumia prototype, and it sounds pretty interesting.
By the looks of things, Windows 10 on ARM features will be usable on Lumia devices, but only on high-end phones such as the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL. It is, however, noting that the developers are still trying to port Windows 10 on ARM to the existing handsets.
As noted above, “Lumia Hapanero,” is an unreleased version of the Lumia 950 that Microsoft presented at Build 2015 and the company never planned to release the phone in the market. The Lumia Hapanero was created to test some experimental features such as Surface Pen support for phones.
Windows Phones are still certainly awesome when comparing them to Android devices or iPhones. The company’s mobile platform struggled with things that never allowed it to grow, like lack of support from the manufacturers, carriers and obviously apps. Despite all these setbacks, Windows phones somehow managed to survive and the operating system is still being used by more than one million users.
While Microsoft has given up on phone business, the company confirmed to us that the company will bring more units of third-party Windows Phones to its online store, which pretty much means that Microsoft isn’t yet done selling Windows 10 Mobile devices.
