Nokia E90 Communicator with Apple Safari as mobile web browser

Posted 2007-10-30 in Mobile Web by Johann.

As it turns out, the Nokia E90 Communicator has Safari as its mobile browser. Of course the E90 doesn’t look like the iPhone at all, but at least the same browser is there.

From what I remember, Nokia had used an own browser in the past. Even though I have no actual experience with Safari, I’m sure it is a better browser than the old Nokia and the other commonly encountered mobile browsers.

User Agent

The E90’s user agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE90-1/07.24.0.3; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413.

Log entries

The requests made by the Safari browser when loading my home page.

"GET / HTTP/1.1" …
"GET /misc/style.js HTTP/1.1" …
"GET /misc/handheld.css HTTP/1.1" …
"GET /misc/screen.css HTTP/1.1" …
"GET /blog/?flavor=simple&entries=1 HTTP/1.1" …

While the Safari-based browser supports JavaScript, it loads style sheets for the handheld and screen media type which reminds me of IEMobile and NetFront.

I might do another statistic about mobile browser usage in a few months and see what has changed in the mobile CSS and JavaScript world.