Samsung's newest S60 phone will be the first with Safari

By Tim Conneally | Published May 28, 2008, 1:57 PM

Announced last week, Samsung's L870 Symbian S60 3.2 Smartphone will be the first handset other than Apple's iconic iPhone to come equipped with Safari as its native mobile browser.

The S60 default browser is based upon the same WebKit browser engine as Safari, so having Safari on board instead may not necessarily be a great technological leap. Like Safari, the S60 browser currently boasts desktop-quality browsing, and has generally been viewed as an excellent application in its own right.

UPDATE: Spec sheets circulated yesterday which listed the new Samsung handset's browser as "Safari" are now presumed to simply referring to the same Webkit-based S60 browser. S60 devices' user-agent string also refers to the browser as "Safari." Whether the nomenclature in the specs was intentionally timed with WWDC has been speculated by some, but will likely remain so. We sincerely hope no lives have been ruined due to this misinformation.

Browsers aside, the L870 is a tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE device that supports HSDPA data transfers, has a 2.4" QVGA TFT display, a 3 megapixel camera, and 100 MB of on-board memory that is expandable to 4 GB via microSD.

Samsung's L870 Symbian S60 phoneInterestingly, the 13.5mm thick handset falls short of the iPhone in that it lacks Wi-Fi connectivity to fully exploit its browsing capabilities...yet it has an FM radio.

Comments

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So now the noobs are giving Apple credit for developing webkit. Guess we can add that to the list of tech they didn't invent, but people seem to think they did; like PDA phones, touch screens, MP3 players, GUI interfaces, the mouse, etc... Whats next? People are gonna think Apple invented BSD?

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Another misleading story title.

Whoever creates the headlines should read (and understand) the story.

The WebKit engine has to do with Safari and the browser for Symbian S60 but Safari is not part of S60 or the Samsung phone shown. Why would Apple put their product on some other manufacturer's phone?

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Do reporters for Betanews get paid?

hope not.

The story alone is misleading enough

but the topic is absolute garbage, its not Safari its WebKit which is an open source project based on the KHTML and KJS libraries in KDE (Yes apples browser engine is also called WebKit and its based on the open source WebKit) but this is the S60 WebKit.

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