I have previously only downloaded files for my 64G/black (059J187) device from NaviFirmEx. Now, Just in case I would ever need to reflash my wife's 16G/magenta device (059K1F7) I wanted to fetch the files before the Navifirm servers go out of business.

To my amazement I found out that the firmware and emmc files are identical with both devices ??

Is the download server somehow giving me wrong links or is that really true? And if it is, what is the point in having different firmware for different memory/colour variants for the same country if the files are identical?

1) It's inherited from the Symbian update scheme - updates are tied to the model identifier (makes identifying region PR to flash easier too)

2) Yes, they are actually 100% identical assuming you're using the same PR_LEGACY (001, etc.) - IIRC when flashing the eMMC there's a tiny Linux kernel that partitions the eMMC using sfdisk or the sort - the table isn't simply dd'ed in.

Yes, the partition table of emmcblk was the thing that amazed me, originally I thought that the flashed image is really for the whole device so that each partition would be first emptied and then written as a stream of bytes from the partition start.

Then, when I found out that flashing the device with full emmc+firmware repartitions the device I thought that the flashed files contain also the patition table, as a static image for the device to be written as the first thing. (I had modified partitions on my device, on both mmcblk0 and mtd, and when I reflashed, it recreated the original partition setup on the device)

So, this idea was proven wrong by the fact that same files can be used to flash different sized devices

Flashing process seems to be a bit more complicated than just writing a static bytestream from a file to the device memory...