SlashGear

Last we heard of the HTC Shift, it looked like the company was considering axing it.  That seems a shame, given that Gear Diary’s Mitchell Oke has discovered it gets a new lease of life with Windows 7.

“As many of you will know, the Shift doesn’t have the highest of specs, and simply could not handle Vista reliably without getting laggy and unresponsive. While I wouldn’t say it runs as well as XP on the Shift, Windows 7 is leaps and bounds ahead of Vista when it comes to performance. With the slate clean, apart from drivers, Windows 7 is quite snappy, yet retains Vista’s “look at me” glass interface” Mitchell Oke

On first install, there’s the usual hassle of missing drivers and non-functional touchscreen – after all, the Shift was shipped with Windows XP - but a trip to the Vista drivers center furnishes the UMPC with everything it needs.  The Shift’s nifty dual-boot Windows/Windows Mobile feature presents a slight issue – there’s no access to HTC’s comms manager in Windows Mobile, so you can’t activate 3G in the usual way – but there’s a simple workaround for it.

Best of all, performance seems to be the best you could hope from an 800MHz processor and 1GB of RAM: most of the speed of XP, but the visual appeal of Vista.  Another Windows 7 convert, and another new lease of life for an aging gadget; what’s not to like?