8 Million Windows Phone 7 Smartphones Wanted by AT&T?

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Just earlier today we told you that AT&T has reported that it activated 3.2 million iPhones last quarter, and 27% of those were new customers. Nice numbers for a carrier that’s said to lose iPhone exclusivity deal soon. Either Verizon or T-Mobile, if not both, are said to get the iPhone at some point in the very near future so it would only make sense for AT&T to get ready for a future in which it won’t own the only shop that has Apple’s new iPhone model.

Apparently AT&T isn’t scared of such a future and, unknown sources that appear to be in the know claimed that the carrier is getting ready for no less than 8 million Windows Phone 7 handsets for later this year. Is AT&T going to make a huge WP7 play? Does the mobile operator have as much faith in Windows Phone 7? Or is AT&T looking for both an Apple and Android alternative, and we all know AT&T is not exactly the carrier to go to for Android services.

The Windows Phone 7 talk has intensified over the last few days. We’ve seen the first unoboxing of a Samsung WP7 smartphone but we also know that other manufacturers like LG, Dell, Asus and HTC are going to make such handsets. We heard that Microsoft will offer a new phone to each one of its employees, in a move that suggests Redmond has a lot of faith in word of mouth advertising campaigns. We also heard that Bing is going to be the official search engine for WP7 handsets, not that we’d expect anything else.

But it’s not only good news when it comes to WP7 handsets and it will be interesting to see whether these devices will be capable of actually fight the iPhone and the top Android smartphones out there. That’s why ordering 8 million Windows Phone 7 handsets sounds like a serious gamble, one that might not pay off, even if we’d want Microsoft to be successful again in the mobile business.

Would you buy a Windows Phone 7 device from AT&T?