Few days back at the Windows Hardware Engineering Community (WinHEC) summit in Shenzhen, China Microsoft while talking about its partnerships with various technology leaders had also mentioned Xiaomi. Microsoft had said that a new program with Xiaomi will invite a select group of Xiaomi Mi 4 power users to help test Windows 10 and contribute to its future release.
This small statement about Microsoft-Xiaomi program had generated lots of interests and had set the people talking. Not much details was made available. People wanted to know more about it. What actually this program is, will a user be able to have dual boot option etc.
Yesterday, Hugo Barra VP, Xiaomi Global clarified some of these points. Here is what he said, quoted in full:
We received many questions from Mi fans about an announcement made by Microsoft yesterday regarding Windows 10 Technical Preview for Mi 4 users in China. We’d like to clarify a few points.
This is an experimental program led by Microsoft, working directly with the Mi fan community in China. Microsoft is working on a build of Windows 10 specifically for Mi 4 devices. This Windows 10 build will not be running on top of Android nor be available as a dual-boot option. A small number of Mi 4 power users from the Xiaomi Forum in China who choose to take part in this experimental program will have to manually re-flash their Mi 4 devices with this Windows 10 ROM, in the same way they would re-flash other Android ROMs. At Xiaomi, we are very supportive of users trying new things and we encourage them to do so all the time! That’s why all of our devices ship with unlocked bootloader, for example. That’s also why Xiaomi welcomes Microsoft team members to interact directly with members of the Xiaomi Forum in China. More details will be announced by Microsoft in the coming months. This program will only be available in China. Xiaomi continues to fully embrace the Android ecosystem through our MIUI software platform and we’re moving ahead full steam building many exciting new Android-based features and services.
So let us wait and watch how the experiment everyone is so interested in, goes.