Windows 10 is Officially Available for Xiaomi Mi 4

XDA

By Tomek Kondrat

Published Dec 3, 2015

Windows has officially made its way on to Android devices, coming from something as unexpected as a Xiaomi-Microsoft partnership. Read on for more!

Android is undoubtedly the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Before Android's supremacy there was one king – Windows Mobile. Now the fallen emperor is back after long years spent in the shadow of Android and iOS.

Ladies and gentlemen - Windows 10 is available to download for Xiaomi Mi 4! And here comes the best part – it's officially supported by both Microsoft and Xiaomi.

The Asian market is still a place covered with fog of war for Microsoft. You can find plenty of Chinese and other Asian OEMs releasing hundreds of devices yearly, but most of them use Android as their operating system of choice. Microsoft wants to change that. The Windows 10 release for the Xiaomi Mi 4 is a cornerstone for global expansion of Microsoft's mobile OS.

Xiaomi introduced its plan to launch Windows 10 for some devices in March, and they needed 9 months to prepare a working ROM for the Mi 4. If you have the LTE version of this device you can download the ROM from the MIUI forums. If you want to use Windows 10 on your phone, you need to become a part of the Windows Insider program, which allows users to test some beta stuff from Microsoft.

Installation is quite simple and requires you to use a Windows PC. It uses a well known soft-brick saver for Qualcomm devices - MiFlash. After setting up an application and drivers you need to simply connect your Mi 4 and click the flash button. It's even simpler than installing a custom recovery or some home-baked kernels. Be aware that Windows 10 is still in its testing phase, so there are bugs – possibly a lot of them. Luckily, XDA developers and enthusiasts are not afraid of bugs as this means that there is room for improvement.

The Xiaomi Mi 4 is not a new device, but it sports a very popular Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 system-on-chip. This processor is present in notable devices such as the OnePlus One, HTC One M8, Sony Xperia Z3 or Samsung Galaxy S5. Releasing software compatible with a similar architecture makes the porting much easier for these phones. Hopefuly we will see a lot of Windows 10 projects for theoretically unsupported devices. There are significant differences between Linux kernel and the NT kernel, but we truly hope that developers will find the way. They always do!

Are you excited to see the Windows 10 on the Xiaomi Mi 4? Share your thoughts in the comments below!