HTC's ubiquitous 4.3-inch Windows smartphone which made its debut in 2009, the HD2 (aka Leo 100), continues to rock on, as having a highly OS change-friendly set of hardware. Tinkerers from all over the world got the phone to run everything from Windows Phone 7 and above, to Android, and Linux. A Russian power-user going by the Twitter handle @CotullaCode added a new feather to its cap, getting it to run Microsoft's flagship OS for ARM tablets, Windows RT. Below are a couple of screenshots from Cotulla's feat.

Unfortunately, Cotulla kept their sauce secret, and didn't tweet instructions on how they managed to pull it off. From pictures posted of the phone running Windows RT (not screenshots), we see that the OS is running inside a UEFI shell, with 10 percent of the phone's WVGA screen width being taken up by the shell's header. The OS sees a screen resolution of 720 x 480, against its physical resolution of 800 x 480.

Windows RT appears to correctly detect the HD2's chops, and all its components seem functional, except its networking components. A little more tinkering should do it, according to Cotulla. Unfortunately, the screen resolution falls a little bit short of what's required to run modern UI (Metro) apps, common (desktop UI) apps for Windows RT (such as Office) run just fine.

In true spirit of modding, Cotulla compiled a custom version of the open-source file-manager and compression utility 7-Zip, and put the HD2 through its benchmark. With a dictionary size of 4 MB and memory usage of 56 MB, the phone managed a compression score of 419 MIPS, and 430 KB/s speed. Things looked naturally better in the decompression department, with the HD2 crunching 680 MIPS, and 7532 KB/s (to the memory). 

Cotulla plans to make a video about the Windows RT contraption soon, hopefully it includes instructions on how you can reproduce their results.