Samsung L870 S60 slider features Webkit-based browser
By Thomas Ricker 
posted May 28th 2008 5:29AM
posted May 28th 2008 5:29AM
Update: As per the full press release (posted after the break), Samsung claimed that they'd brought mobile Safari to this device. Technically feasible, we suppose, but far more unlikely than some clueless PR flack screwing up the release. We'll let you know if Samsung HQ has anything differently to say about the matter, but until then we're calling this Webkit, not Safari.
Update 2: Yup, it's Webkit all right.
Samsung Introduces L870, a Stylish S60 Device
With a stunning design and open OS, styling and managing life is easier
With a stunning design and open OS, styling and managing life is easier
SEOUL, KOREA – May 28, 2008 – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, a leading mobile phone provider, introduced L870, a S60 embedded Smartphone designed for a life-enhancing experience. With an exquisite stainless steel body fully packed with the most-up-to-date OS applications, L870 will upgrade both style and productivity in everyday life.
Like a tailored pair of suit, every millimeter of L870 is carefully custom-designed to match the user's lifestyle. A magnificent stainless steel body softly brushed with elegant hairline pattern, and a 13.5mm slim and sleek outline, will perfectly complement every outfit and style. A minimalistic key pad that appearing when slides up, is deliberately designed to provide enough spaces between each keys to provide convenience.
Leveraging the capabilities of S60 platform, L870 brings full connectivity and application that surpass expectations for a handset device. The applications and features of the S60 software are not only easy to learn and use, but also enable maximum productivity. With Full-speed internet browser and more than 6,000 open applications are also compatible with L870 to customize the device for each individual's needs.
L870 features many useful Samsung pre-installed applications such as an advanced task manager Checkit, PIMs (Personal information manager) homescreen, Team manager and business card recognition function. With these applications, users will experience better time and life managing experience than ever.
L870 boasts many other latest applications and interfaces. Creative user interface (UI) featuring three different themes, 2.4-inch QVGA TFT display, a 3-megapixel camera, FM radio with RDS, music player and Bluetooth v.2.0 supports are all embedded within L870 for satisfying visual and audio entertainment needs.
"We are happy to compliment our product portfolio with yet another appealing S60 mobile, Samsung L870 that is fully customized with style, performance and user interface," says, Jongin Kim, the Vice President of Mobile Communication Division of Samsung Electronics. "With S60, we can successfully deliver the latest mobile technology with fully customizable applications and the intuitive user interfaces."
Samsung L870 will first be launched in Europe around August, then will continue to be available in all regions where GSM is available.
Surprised it took this long...
Serious?
:o :o :o
wow
I understand that's the best mobile browser on the planet.
Yeah, its quite impressive running on the iPhone OS, but I'm not quite sure how effective the transition to Symbian will be. Sure, it may sell like hot cakes, but will it be as user-friendly and responsive? Only time will tell...
you mean, the iPlanet?
skyfire!
ooo - now then, somebody rip it so I can have it on my Nokia 6210c :P
symbian meets safari meets style eh?
when is the next plane to europe....
What's the point of this? The default S60 browser already renders pages better than the iPhone's browser AND it supports flash video etc...
Coming from someone named Engadgetluvsappl.
Sorry, that was a cheap shot. You may be right. I have no idea though.
Wait a minute... The press release doesn't mention anything about it being the iPhone's browser. It's possible they called it a Safari browser simply because it's kinda based on Safari.
Anyways, I'll bet you that this browser(aswell as the iPhone's browser) that the Engadget boys are getting erections over is still technically inferior to that of the E90's or N95 8GB's browser.
I second the fact that S60's existing browser is better than iphone's safari. Use it and love it everyday.
Nokia has been running a webkit-based browser well before the iPhone. Webkit is an open-source Konqueror browser kernel that Apple adopted - they did not create it from scratch, which is why anyone else can implement it, like the Iris browser on Windows Mobile.
However the best,most full-featured mobile browser has to be Opera Mobile 9.5, as implemented on the HTC Diamond. Hands down the best.
"they did not create it from scratch, which is why anyone else can implement it"... That's not entirely true - Apple weren't under any obligation to release Webkit, and at first they didn't. It is now, however, open source.
Another vote for this being the exact same S60 browser, with the name (a trademark, incidentally, so if anyone drops Apple Legal a line they may have to change it) just to make people think it's cooler than it is..
lol @ people low ranking comments just because they like the S60 browser
just for the record, I too, think the S60 browser is better
Actually, Fernando, Apple IS under obligation to release the source code of WebKit, as it is based on KHTML. KHTML is the rendering engine used in the KDE "Konqueror" browser, and like the rest of KDE, is released under the GPL.
Like Microsoft, Apple (read: Steve Jobs) has a pretty strong "hoarding" mentality, and rarely gives away anything when he believes that will give others (competitors?) an advantage. So while the "Darwin" core of Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD, any and all components that were developed by Apple (starting with the Aqua user inferface) remains strictly under Apple control.
Symbian is a slightly different beast. It is not open source by any means (after all, Symbian Ltd, do have a business to run selling their OS to phone vendors), but both Symbian as well as its major shareholder, Nokia, are eager to see their platform being used across the phones from multiple vendors. No altruism involved, of course, just a different line of thinking from Steve Jobs (since Nokia tend to differentiate their products based on hardware and capabilities more than the slickness of the UI).
I can't stand the iPhone fanbois either, but calling the S60's browser better than the iPhone's is absolutely crazy.
Sorry, wrong attribution: I mean to address Hawkman, not Fernando.
In either case, what I said pertains to the WebKit rendering engine, and not "Safari" or "Mobile Safari". Those are trademarked by Apple.
FWIW, the user-agent string from my Nokia N95-4 (8GB NAM) is:
Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/92.; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN5_8GB-3/20.2.005 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413
iPhones Safari is better... at crashing every five minutes.
It's no N95/N95 8GB/N82 (feature-wise).
Thats why its a samsung L870 not any of those phones.
At last, something decent from Samsung with nice specs.
Why did they leave Symbian anyway years ago, it is the right way to go. Anyway, they realized it now.
That reason is probally just because Nokia owns 49% of Symbian and Samsung is Nokia's closest competition with..what 14%? While Nokia got that 40% market share.
So it would probally serve them better if the number 2 mobile phone manufacturer would have it's own platform or at least wouldnt be paying anything to Nokia from it's hit phones.
You are right about paying for the platform, but I don't think Samsung's user interface etc. are really useful. I've used Samsung phones of my friends and the menu, option, basically everything was complicated and unclear. Even though it costs a lot, Samsung may pay for the Symbian licenses because Symbian's features are going to save them, IMO.
But I'm not a marketing expert, I was just saying that Samsung has come with something decent featuring Symbian, which they shouldn't have left using for a few years anyway, from a "customer"s perspective.
This is another big step for Apple towards trying to break into new segments of the market where they have lacked a positioning before due to lack of own products and hardware. iTunes, QuickTime and Safari for Windows, Safari for Symbian. Can there ever be Mac OS for PC's? I doubt it but this is definately a step closer.
You don't *honestly* believe that Apple would work with Samsung and offer them a handset browser, do you?
It's Apple we're talking about here, a company that has never been known for being great in collaborations...
@L: "a company that has never been known for being great in collaborations..."
Taligent. ;-)
Also, what would make me buy this phone over the N78 or N96? Samsung S60 phones aren't compatible with ALOT of the 10,000+ S60 apps available and to be honest, this just doesn't look as nice as the recent offerings from Nokia.
Seeing as it's a Samsung, it'll probably also be much more expensive than Nokia alternatives....
By the way, there's no mention of WiFi???
"Also, what would make me buy this phone over the N78 or N96?"
Price, maybe?
Everyone is not financially powerful enough to afford Nokia.
Yeah, Nokia is way better, but think of the budget.
Can, I doubt it will be much cheaper. Look at the Samsung G810 for example...
Hmm we need clarification here.
A Web-Kit browers I understand. i.e. the Safari rendering engine, with their own UI on top.
But "Safari" suggests its not only WebKit, but also the UI and functionality on top of that that Apple have that they consider to be "Safari"
Its remotely possible I guess, being officailly "Safari" may up the useage stats and get people more aware, rather than splitting Safari into that and WebKit.
Obviously they made a mistake and its a webkit based browser
obviously, I skimmed the specs twice but didn't see a touchscreen. Mobile Safari is extremely dependent on touch.
Obviously, but we will have to wait for the engadget: "Update: Sorry, Samsung confirms that it's a mistake"
Funny Fact: the default S60 Browser has been based on WebKit ever since S60 reached v3, and its user-agent string also identifies that browser as being Safari...
So how exactly is this big news?
Exactly. Engadget, please take out that N95 8GB that you've got and then inspect the user agent string.
...yup. I can confirm this on my N75.
So, does this mean all those stats saying that the iPhone now accounted for {insert large number}% of mobile browsing are a crock of shite? I presume they're derived from the agent ID...
Having said that, I think Safari Mobile (on my iPod Touch) is the best mobile browser by far -- even compared to Opera Mini 4 on my SE phone.
The iPhone's browser identifies as mobileSafari though, not Safari...
So Nokia's only "helping" those statistics. The iPhone and iPod touch browser-share statistics are legit.
From the press release:
"Like a tailored pair of suit"
What? What's a pair of suit? Do they mean trousers? I think we should be told.
woooo.... Safari...wooooo... is that good? No. Sucks for Samsung. Opera Mini was a much better choice, if you'll have a low-res non-touchscreen device.
Personally, I'm waiting for a Firefox mobile.
I call shenanigans, I'll bet it's just the standard S60 browser with a more marketable name.
Anyway, +1 to Samsung, especially around WWDC, effective troll is effective
This seems really nice mid high end phone. Got that 6500 slider style of looks that sold truck loads + it has feature pack 2 that's nice suprise as Samsung have most of the time been one step behind Nokia when it comes vers of Symbian.
Could be a real hit.
http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/S60/trunk/
They've at least done it properly and made there own svn tree for their custom version...
As others have pointed out, webkit comes from KDE (their repo goes back to 2001-08-24) and Nokia was using it before Apple. Though I find the n95's browser navigation quite goofy, and glaringly inconsistent with the rest of the phone's UI.
it's probably Samsung's old browser and they just renamed it Safari. They are like hmm, let's call it Safari. It's not under the CEO of Samsung to do this, heck is predececer has already been charged with FRAUD a couple times.
umm...s60v3's default browser has been based on webkit for around 2 years... this is nothing new nor exciting...
.....that is why the iphone had "the most web traffic" in apple's keynot.. because most site statistic apps didn't differentiate between the 10s of millions of symbian devices to the 4 million iphones.....when they updated those stats... the iphone had around 1.6% of mobile web traffic, and symbian jumped to 24... (it was still beat by the psp around 27%)
features are average on this phone.......definitely nothing to write home about...especially the browser....4gb max? gah.....phones for 3 years have been doing that....
altho i suspect this is going to a be a value s60 phone....so it will have it's weight..
the only feature i see pushing new tech... is os 9.3.... but thats because phones are just startin to trickle out with that...
jus my 2 cents
Methinks you are right. Here is the User-Agent string from my N95-4:
Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/92.; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN5_8GB-3/20.2.005 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413
It just looks too much like a N95 (which isn't bad) and I would take Safari off and go with Opera mini
WOW!, indeed. Hopefully this phone doesn't share the same fate that my perfectly tailored pair of suit did after the operation that detached my brother from my hip...he was buried in it(them(the pair of, that is)). Life enhancing.
There's so much nonsense written here is is hilarious.
“Webkit is an open-source Konqueror browser kernel”
Kernel? This isn't an operating system!
Although Webkit steams from KHTML, huge investment (mainly by Apple, but also by Google as well) has resulted in big improvements.
Although Webkit is open source and has some great input from the community, it is important to remember Webkit is Apple's baby. Apple employs people full time to work on this project. Apple created the initial branch and Apple is pushing it the hardest:
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/02/10/0750211.shtml
S60 is benefiting from the communities work on an Apple funded project. To try and credit Nokia with using Webkit “before” Apple when Apple was using Webkit internally before anyone knew Webkit existed had me in stitches.
iPhone browser market share is worked out from the user agent string, which is specfic to the iPhone, it is perfectly possible to tell it from S60 devices. I highly doubt the S60 browser renders pages better than iPhone, cause they both use Webkit. Maybe the same. Except S60 doesn't have Quartz.
I'm not sure if you were saying the webkit timeline in regards to my statement...I was pointing more in relation to the iPhone, as it is a less mature mobile device....but Steve Jobs' claimed that the iPhone, only 8 months on the market (or w/e it was at the time), had the most web traffic, out of any device, period.
and yes, most a relatively high percentage of stats, just read webkit, saw it was a mobile, and assumed iphone.. in fact.. a website one of my friends ran, i had a test run.. and both my iphone (obviously) and n95 showed up as an iphone on the records. iirc, it was seeing webkit, and just labeling it. had one of my buddies update the stats "engine", and voila, it read properly.
sure, safari on iphone can't do flash, but it is definitely better for browsing, mainly due to form factor. otherwise it's very similar.. for obvious reasons...
but to market the s60 browser as safari browser? i call marketing shenanigans to boost sales.