Hardware manufacturers continue to explore the possibilities of offering dual-booting capabilities on their mobile devices. While tablets such as the ASUS Tranformer Book Duet have garnered most of the attention, smartphones could also offer such capabilities. In fact, the Geeksphone Revolution already offers something like that with Android and Boot2Gecko by Mozilla. It may soon be joined by Huawei. The Chinese company is planning to launch a smartphone supporting both Android and Windows Phone as early as Q2 2014.
Speaking to TrustedReviews, Huawei Chief Marketing Officer Shao Yang suggested that pairing Windows Phone with Android might help customer adoption for Microsoft’s mobile operating system. He also indicated that standalone Windows Phone handsets are not as high a priority to Huawei as Android devices.
“Compared with Android, the priority of Windows Phone is much lower but is still one of our choices of OS. We are definitely using a multi OS strategy,” he explained. He then added, “If it is Windows only, maybe people will not find it as easy a decision to buy the phone. If they have the Android and Windows together, you can change it as you wish and it is much easier for people to choose Windows Phone.”
Yang revealed little about the device itself but indicated that it would launch in the U.S. sometime next quarter.
It remains to be seen if Google or Microsoft will have anything to say about this Huawei dual-OS smartphone. There have been recent rumours that Google is less than pleased with ASUS over its dual-OS Transformer Book Duet. If true, it’s likely that it is no happier about such a solution on smartphones.
Huawei did not rule out supporting other mobile operating systems as well. “We are definitely looking at other platforms,” Yang said. “For any new operating system we are open to. We need to watch every OS.”
Source : Trusted Reviews