Image of Samsung ‘Mandel’ based on Windows Phone OS surfaces

Now that Samsung’s Galaxy S III has been officially unveiled, it’s time for some leaked pictures of a new Sammy handset, this time, based on Windows Phone. There were rumours floating around the Internet towards the tail-end of last year, about how Samsung was planning on launching a pair of LTE-enabled Windows Phone devices sometime in 2012. Could this be the first of the two? Codenamed ‘Mandel’, this new phone will run on Windows Phone OS, most likely Mango, whenever it launches. Thankfully, this time around, we have a pretty good shot of the back of the phone instead of some blurry spy shot. The design of Mandel looks very similar to the newly announced Galaxy S III, with the same pebble like rear-end. It also appears to be a very slim device and we’d estimate it to sport a 4-inch screen.

Is this the first WP7 Apollo device?

The overall design actually looks a bit better than the S III. Another leaked image of Zune shows the phone bearing the model number SGH-I667, which could indicate it belongs to the Samsung Focus family. If you look at the front of the phone in the Zune image, it does bear a striking resemblance to the Focus itself, so this could very well be a replacement for it. There are absolutely no details on the pricing or release date for Mandel right now but we should hear about that soon. Now, the bigger question is would it make sense to go for a Windows Phone 7.5 device now and risk not getting the update to Apollo or Windows Phone 8?

A view from Zune

There has been a lot of chatter about how current WP7 devices stand the chance of not getting any further updates in the future. Tango is coming soon, but that’s only going to roll out for lower end phones. Could it be possible that the Samsung Mandel would be one of the first phones to come with Apollo? There’s no release date or word on anything about this phone so you never know, it could just happen.