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Dual boot phones .... ever?

byke

byke

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 29, 2007
724
60
LDN. UK
So what do you think, can you ever imagine a time where a iPhone could offer the possibility to boot another operating system or even run a virtual operating system?

Prior to the intel shift we saw in OS X, most people could not see a day when apple would let users run windows on their hardware. But since that time we have seen sales climb.

So what do you think, could apple have a dual boot option in the future?
And could that increase market dominance?
 
Wonder whatever happen with one of the JB team working on dual booting iOSes? Wouldn't have minded to have iOS 6 and iOS 8 on my iPhone 5.
 
One time, long ago, it was possible to dual boot two different versions of iOS. It was mostly iOS 3 and iOS 4 on the iPod Touch 2G and older devices. It was a pain to set up, but worked well.
 
HTC didn't technically make a dual boot phone, but they offered Android and WP8.1 versions of the HTC One M8.

So it's actually a single phone that can support two different OSes, with a different ROM I guess.

Technically, the iPhone can do it, but Apple doesn't have a reason to. It's a phone, not a computer.

On another note, some Chinese chap managed to get Windows 95 running on an iPhone 6 Plus: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/10/chinese-programmer-sticks-windows-95-on-an-iphone-6-plus/
 
I could see virtual uses maybe for apps like BB enterprise apps or if you have purchased android apps you want to keep. Kind of like how BB lets you run their apps or android apps from the Amazon app store.
 
I could see dual booting if Apple hadn;t been such a huge influence early on. At this point I don't see it. Not Officially. There are a couple examples of unofficial dual booting though. Most of them involve windows phone (and even the original iPhone) running Android.
 
Just too much unnecessary complexity to make it worthwhile. Mobile devices are all about specialization and hardware optimization.
 
Another thing I forgot about, the iPhone 2G, iPod Touch 1G, and iPhone 3G can already boot between iOS and Android. Granted it is an older, unstable build of Android, but they can.
 
I can only imagine some Chinese knockoff doing this, can't see the point in it myself - half the selling point of a phone is it's OS in my opinion.
 
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I wish jailbroken iPhone 6S and plus could dual boot iOS and Android, now that we have 2GB or ram and very powerful A9. As an Android app developer, and who wants to use iPhone for syncing perfectly with Mac & iPad, and also want the best-in-class iPhone hardware, I think this will be really amazing. Seriously, there is no Android phone from a big name company that has all metal phone that I like. The only option is HTC, but I don't like their black bezels. There is Galaxy A series, but unfortunately, they don't support AWS (T-mobile, Wind, etc). No choice for me.
 
byke said:
So what do you think, can you ever imagine a time where a iPhone could offer the possibility to boot another operating system or even run a virtual operating system?
Click to expand...

Sure it will happen at some point ( at least being able to run a vm ). Everythings getting so powerful.

How useful it will be to run a vm on a phone i dunno but it will happen.

I think in the next few years the lines between phone and watch etc will just blur into "wearable computing" ...
 
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