Sorry Nokia, consider your thunder stolen. It hasn’t yet made an appearance at Samsung’s big IFA press conference inside the Berlin Tempodrom, but Samsung’s first Windows Phone 8 device has just been made official thanks to a post on Microsoft’s Windows Phone Blog.
That device in question is the ATIV (Ah-TEEV, not EYY-tiv) S, a rather handsome new handset that sports a (sadly unspecified) 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel rear camera, and a 1.9-megapixel front-facing counterpart to boot.
Update (5:02PM ET): Neither Samsung nor Microsoft dug into what kind of processor the ATIV S has under the hood, but Qualcomm confirmed to PC Magazine that it’s an MSM8260A. That’s the same chipset seen in the U.S. variants of the HTC One X and Galaxy S III so the ATIV won’t leave you wanting for horsepower, but it means LTE is definitely off the table.
The spec sheet may not be the most riveting you’ll ever see — Windows Phone has never really required bleeding edge hardware — but the move puts the pressure on Nokia to unveil something tremendous next week.
The ATIV S features a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display swathed in Gorilla Glass, which may make it a bit of a handful (its size puts it right up there in Galaxy S III territory) — but there’s little question that Samsung knows how to make a big device feel smaller than it actually is. The fact that the ATIV S squeezes all that into a brushed aluminum 8.7mm thick chassis (the Galaxy S III is only just a hair thinner at 8.6mm) certainly doesn’t hurt. What really lends the ATIV some star power is that it’s the world’s first Windows Phone 8 device, though it may be a while before the rest of us get to see how well the software complements the hardware.
Users will be able to pick up a 16 or 32GB model at some point in the near future — no one has mentioned availability yet — but they can rest easy knowing that at long last they’ll be able to throw a microSD card into their Windows Phone.
