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

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.

Interestingly, 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.