Samsung SGH-i707, a whole different device?

Sam­sung SGH-i707

The image above is the the Sam­sung SGH-i707, the device Microsoft is giv­ing out to devel­op­ers and tech review­ers to pre­view Win­dows Phone 7. Accord­ing to Microsoft, this device will never be released to mar­ket. The Sam­sung SGH-i707 is more than just a hacked up i8910. It appears that the only thing sim­i­lar between this device and Sam­sung i8910 is the shell. The devices look almost iden­ti­cal on the out­side except for some small but sig­nif­i­cant differences.

Sam­sung SGH-i707, the back panel reads “GI8910”

From the image above, you can see that the back panel is exactly the same as on the i8910 — in fact is says “CI8910”! The design is the same, dual speak­ers on the top and lower ends of the device, prox­im­ity and light sen­sors on the top, cov­ered head phone jack on the top end and a micro usb slot and micro SD card slot on either side. When they launch, Win­dows Phone 7 devices won’t sup­port expand­able mem­ory. So for this device, the micro SD card is “glued” in to the phone — Microsoft says tak­ing it out will mess it up. It also has a smaller screen, prob­a­bly 3.5″ or less as opposed to the 3.7″ screen of the i8910.

Sam­sung SGH-i707 5MP Camera

Another thing to note is the 5 Mega Pixel cam­era. The Sam­sung i8910 has an 8 Mega Pixel cam­era. This could mean that they have a dif­fer­ent sen­sor and cam­era sys­tem all together or they just have dumbed down settings.

Accord­ing to Tera-WURFL, the device was released in Decem­ber 2009. All this got me won­der­ing — if there were so many dif­fer­ent devices on the mar­ket and with so many part­ners, why did Microsoft go for the i8910? Surely they could have gone out and mod­i­fied a device with Win­dows Mobile 6.5 like the HTC HD2 for instance or even the Sam­sung Omnia II.

That leads me to sev­eral con­clu­sions. First, the only way to run Win­dows Phone 7 on the i8910 is to change not only the soft­ware com­po­nent, but the hard­ware as well. Microsoft prob­a­bly went with the i8910 because it’s now quite cheap, it has flex­i­ble hard­ware i.e it can eas­ily sup­port many dif­fer­ent plat­forms and they only needed to replace the dis­play at least and some writ­ing around the cam­era and front but­tons. Microsoft prob­a­bly avoided exist­ing Win­dows Mobile devices to avoid cre­at­ing false hope or unnec­es­sary pres­sure from the own­ers of those devices. The i8910 just isn’t very pop­u­lar and it runs Sym­bian; it was an easy pick.