While I expressed a great deal of disappoint that T-Mobile didn’t show off their Galaxy S II device last night at the Samsung Press Event, I clearly wasn’t alone. A number of sites have begun speculating and all seemingly agreeing on the “real” reason T-Mobile wasn’t keen to show off their own version.
Both the AT&T and Sprint versions of the Galaxy S II have the Samsung Exynos 4210 processor inside and the AT&T version, like the European counterpart can hop onto HSPA+ networks but only to the speed of 21Mbps. T-Mobile who has previously been rumored to want to bump up the speed capability of their own Galaxy S II device to 42Mbps has likely forced Samsung to stuff a competitors solution into their flagship phone.
This all being said, we expect that when someone finally gets a chance to tear open a Samsung Galaxy S II of the T-Mobile kind, they will discover some Qualcomm love inside. The Qualcomm Snapdragon processor would provide the 42Mbps requested speeds when paired with Qualcomm’s MDM8220 modem which will also likely be found inside the T-Mobile GSII variant.
During yesterday’s press event we should emphasize that Samsung was careful only to say that the T-Mobile model was dual-core and did not confirm or deny the presence of the Exynos chip inside. The Intel XMM6260 modem that is found in the European models of the GSII and likely the AT&T version as well will top out at 21Mbps HSPA+ speeds.
So there you go, while we are still hugely disappointed that we didn’t get to see a whole lot of hands on and video time there might actually be a good reason that T-Mobile didn’t want to show off the device. I’ll gladly take 42Mbps capability over a few minutes of hands on time, how about you?
P.S. Check out the pictures of TmoNews up on the AT&T version of the Galaxy S II. Thanks Aaron!
