True to its promise, the first public build of Windows 10 Technical Preview for Phones is now available for download just moments ago. However, it can only be installed to a number of Lumia smartphones at the moment.
Included in the list are Lumia 630, Lumia 635, Lumia 636, Lumia 638, Lumia 730, and Lumia 830. The preview build will be made available for other Lumia smartphone later on but unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t announced any set release timeline for them apart from “over the next few months” description by Joe Belfiore, the company’s Corporate Vice President for its Operating Systems Group.
The decision by Microsoft to limit the amount of smartphones that are able to utilize Windows 10 Technical Preview might be disappointing to some Windows Phone onwers but there is apparently a good yet very technical reason to it. Here’s an explanation by Gabriel Aul, the Manager for Windows Insiders Program:
Some context on why we chose these and not higher end phones like the 930/Icon or 1520: We have a feature that will be coming soon called “partition stitching” which will allow us to adjust the OS partition dynamically to create room for the install process to be able to update the OS in-place. Until this comes in, we needed devices which were configured by mobile operators with sufficiently sized OS partitions to allow the in-place upgrade, and many of the bigger phones have very tight OS partitions.
Note that this doesn’t mean that Windows 10 will take more disk space than Windows Phone 8.1, it’s just a function of the upgrade process at this point. Once the partition stitching feature is completed, many more devices will be supported.
Nevertheless, if you owned one of the supported devices and are dare enough to test out early build of Windows 10 for Phones on your Lumia, do make your way to the Windows Insider’s official website to learn more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckzhX1O6Lto
[Source: Windows Insider Program, Windows Official Blog]
