Due to the high density, a socket will not fit without a making a pigtail to fit onto the board (commonly available sockets are fairly big).<p>The flash in question is a BGA part on a high density double sided board. It definitely would be hard to desolder the flash without desoldering anything else nearby (as a bonus, the CPU is directly on the other side of the PCB). Specialized machines exist for doing this, but require a highly skilled operator.<p>They want something they can plug the phone into so they can give every site one and not send it out to a expensive technician for modification and data extraction.