Alcatel OneTouch raised a few eyebrows this week, as its chief marketing officer and vice president, Dan Dery, said that it plans to launch tablet-sized devices running the Windows Phone OS, including a 10-inch slate with a 'Smart Flip' cover.

The company launched a Windows Phone 7.8 handset at the end of 2012, but then veered away from the platform to focus exclusively on Android instead. But now Alcatel has joined a growing number of companies who are repurposing Android devices to launch them as Windows Phones.

As WMPowerUser reports, Alcatel has shown off a Windows Phone version of its new POP 2 Android handset, and it will be the first handset running Microsoft's mobile OS to feature a 64-bit processor. The device is also one of the first to include Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410 chipset.

The device is outwardly identical to its Android counterpart, with the exception of the removal of the Android hardware buttons, replaced by on-screen Back, Start and Search 'soft buttons' on the Windows Phone version. Its key specs include:

4.5-inch FWVGA (854x480px) display

Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset, with quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 CPU and Adreno 306 GPU

1GB RAM

8GB storage (with microSD slot)

5MP rear camera with autofocus and LED flash

VGA front-facing camera

132.5 x 65.4 x 9.9mm, 147g

​2000mAh battery

4G LTE connectivity

​Interchangeable covers (red, yellow, blue, green and purple)

The Alcatel OneTouch POP2 with Windows Phone is expected to go on sale for around €119 EUR ($153 USD) off-contract. Its release date has not yet been announced, but running the latest version of the OS, Windows Phone 8.1 Update, it is likely to launch alongside other handsets with this version - including the new Lumia 730, 735 and 830 - in the next few weeks.

Source: WMPowerUser | image via Alcatel OneTouch