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Ultra-quick Samsung WebKit review

On Thursday I got a Samsung bada test phone (the Wave) that runs the latest installment of Samsung WebKit, and of course I subjected it to various tests. The verdict is clear: excellent browser. As far as I’m concerned it ousts Opera Mobile from my personal top three.

Judge for yourself. This is what the latest Samsung WebKit supports:

• It scores second, after Safari 4 for desktop, in my great WebKit test. It leaves both iPhone and Android in the dust; although I haven’t yet tested Android 2.1 and 2.2 or the upcoming iPhone 4.
• The touch events; touchstart, touchmove and touchend. It’s only the third browser to do so after Safari iPhone and Android WebKit. Unfortunately support is not perfect; my scrolling layer example doesn’t work for reasons unknown.
• Geolocation
• Local storage
• Appcache
• The bada platform as a whole supports W3C Widgets, although I haven’t yet found a way to install test widgets without going through the Samsung App Store. Samsung, please add a possibility for developers to install widgets locally. We’re going to need it.
• Samsung WebKit uses pinch-zoom, and one iPhone-using friend whom I showed it to said it was better than the iPhone’s zoom. I’m not yet quite certain whether that’s true, but it’s certainly good.

Not bad, right? Next week I’m on holiday, but when I return I’ll update some more tests with Samsung WebKit data (as well as data on other recent updates; most notably Android).

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