Dual booting is the latest mobile fad, and by all accounts it won’t be long before it arrives: according to Huawei, the first examples will be available as early as the second quarter of 2014.
Speaking to TrustedReviews, Huawei’s chief marketing officer, Shao Yang, explained that the company will release a phone combing Android and Windows Phone in the second quarter of this year. That means it should be available at about the same time as Windows 8.1 rolls out — although it’s not clear which version of the OS the phone will ship with.
Yang explained that users will be able to “change it as you wish”, offering the choice because “if it is Windows only, maybe people will not find it as easy a decision to buy the phone.” That’s about the best explanation anyone’s yet got for releasing a dual-boot phone.
Honestly, we’re not clear on the benefits: unlike PCs where dual-booting can help run once piece of hardware for quite different usage scenarios, a phone is, when it comes down to it, a phone. You talk, text, email, browse and snap photos, and it’s just not clear to us why you’d need to boot into a whole different OS for some marginal benefit in functionality.
But let’s not stand in the way of progress. 2014 may the year of populist dual-booting; let’s wait see what that holds. [TrustedReviews via Verge]