Samsung L870 unveiled - Symbian smartphone in metal

Yet another Symbian S60 joins the ranks of Samsung high-class sliders. Reminding strongly of the Samsung G810, the Samsung L870 has a great-looking brushed stainless steel body and some capable hardware.

The Samsung L870 is powered by the same Symbian OS and user interface as all Nokia N-series smartphones. This new pup is only 13.5mm in thickness and has a 3 megapixel camera and a 2.4-inch 16M color TFT display with QVGA resolution. Unfortunately we still don't know whether the camera has an auto focus system or not.

The Samsung L870 will have tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support plus HSDPA 3.6Mbps for fast wireless data transfers. Speaking of wireless, the only thing that let us down in the L870 specs sheet is that it lacks Wi-Fi functionality. Pity indeed, since the device is the first Symbian smartphone to have the Safari mobile web browser on board. Whether it's exactly the same browser as in the Apple iPhone is not yet sure. However we should point out that the excellent Symbian S60 3rd edition mobile web browser shares one and the same platform with the iPhone's Safari mobile browser.

Bashed: We received an email from Samsung apologizing for the misunderstanding about the mentioning of the Safari browser in their press release. The Samsung L870 is equipped with the latest version of the S60 web browser and not the Safari mobile browser by Apple. As we already pointed out, the two mobile browser share the same platform.

The Samsung L870 will also host FM radio and Bluetooth and USB connectivity. The internal memory is 100MB and the memory card slot can take a microSD card with a capacity of up to 4GB.

Luckily, we can throw in a couple of make-shift live shots we were able to take.

The Samsung L870 will be available in Europe this August 2008 - that will be a fast one. Pricing is yet unknown however.