Samsung’s “Safari Browser” Likely Just S60’s WebKit Browser

Samsung has presented their L870 Symbian-based smartphone at the S60 Summit 2008, which has started today in Barcelona. Some blogs are speculating that it includes Apple’s Safari, even while neither Samsung’s own press release, nor Apple or Nokia or anyone at the S60 organisation have said it is actually the Apple Safari running on Symbian 9.3. Update: Intomobile confirms that it’s the latest S60s WebKit-based browser, as expected. In fact, Nokia is using the summit to push the latest version of their S60 web browser and services.

Pre-installed apps: Quick Office document viewer, WebKit-based S60 browser, music and video player, push-email support, and other standard S60 apps.

Samsung’s press materials included a table that claims the brushed steel L870 has something called the “Safari browser,” but like all the latest Nokia S60 mobile phones, it probably just uses Nokia’s own S60 Web Browser, which is often referred to as “Safari” because it uses the open source WebKit—Apple’s Safari foundation, but not the actual Safari. The possibility of Apple actually giving one of the iPhone’s crown jewels to the competition, and then porting it to Symbian—without any of the iPhone’s user interface programming classes—is close to zero.

In other words, nothing to see here that we haven’t seen before. [S60 and Symbian Freak via Phone Arena]