Samsung is going to launch its L870 slider mobile phone next month. Samsung L870  looks like the Soul phone and it runs Symbian 9.3 S60 OS.

Other than tri-band GSM support, the L870 works with also 3G UMTS and HSDPA. It has a 2.3-inch QVGA display, a 3 Megapixel camera, a VGA front camera, FM tuner, Bluetooth and a microSD card slot.

The Samsung L870 is a 3.5G device with a 3 megapixel camera and a 2.4" 240 x 320 pixel display. The SGH-L870 runs Symbian 9.3 with the S60 3.2 interface, similar to most contemporary S60 smartphones. In addition to the usual S60 multimedia features, the L870 comes with an FM radio. There's also a variety of push email support, an office document viewer, personal information management applications and we understand that the SGH-L870 comes with a mobile version of the Apple Safari web browser. Samsung say that the L870 offers "DVD quality" video capture, but does not go into technical details.

So.. it's a good looking HSDPA slider phone, but you might expect that the L870 was going to get some tough competition from Nokia. But, oddly enough, the only HSDPA slider phone from Nokia is the N95 and N95 8GB. The Samsung L870 pitches somewhere below the N95 on price, so surprisingly it seems to have found a market niche.

As we just mentioned, the L870 doesn't pitch against the N95. There's no GPS, no WiFi and the main camera resolution is less. But it does compare well against the Nokia E65 (which lacks HSDPA but has WiFi) and the upcoming Nokia E66 slider.

There are still some features that we don't know about - for example, we cannot say if the L870 has autofocus and a flash for the main camera. We don't know how much the L870 weighs, or what the battery life is. But what we can tell is that the L870 promises to be a pretty good S60 handset, and it is one of the few devices worth looking at if you want S60 on a platform other than a Nokia.

The Samsung L870 should be available in certain regions from August 2008 onwards.