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Literally Windows on arm: here is Windows running on the Pixel Watch 3

Pixel Watch 3 with Windows

What comes to your mind when you hear "Windows on ARM?" Probably a modern Windows PC with a Snapdragon processor, good battery life, and questionable app compatibility (it is much better these days than before). How about Windows literally on an arm? Like on a part of the human body?

That is what Gustave Monce, the maker of the WOA-Project (that thing that made it possible to run Windows on the Lumia 950 series and the Surface Duo family), decided to achieve. Lo and behold, a Pixel Watch 3 with Windows.

Right off the bat, there is not that much use for a Pixel Watch with Windows on it. The project, as the maker says, is for "shits and giggles" and more like an April Fool's joke. However, it shows how capable modern smartwatches are, with the Pixel Watch 3 being powered by a processor with four ARM Cortex A53 cores, 2GB of DDR4X memory, and 32GB of storage.

Getting Windows to run on Gustave's arm, as you can imagine, took some time and effort of inspecting a rooted boot image, modifying the stock UEFI to run custom UEFI, editing the ACPI table, and patching plenty of other files. The result of all that is a Pixel Watch 3 with Windows PE.

Pixel Watch 3 with Windows
Picture taken with Windows PE still loading. Credit: Gustave Monce

Again, not very practical (it cannot even display time), but it is still something. Gustave also managed to make it work as USB mass storage (look at all those partitions).

Pixel Watch 3 with Windows

All who want to run UEFI, Linux, or Windows on the Pixel Watch 3 (large size, LTE model) can head to GitHub. There, you will find guides about installing UEFI and going into mass storage mode. A dedicated guide about actually installing an operating system should come a bit later. You can also read more about Windows on an arm in this blog post.

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