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Apple iPhone and the Future Mobile Web--Safari Anyone?
Ok, another post about things going on elsewhere. I must be slipping.
But this is big too. The Web development community is all abuzz with posts about the new Apple iPhone. Web development community you say? Yeah. Why?
Well, because the Internet features are totally cool and uses a mobile version of Safari. Just watch the demo and read the posts (see below).
It features a full, scaled and zoomable Safari / WebKit based browser which runs on the small screen either landscape or vertically. Very cool with touch screen interaction. There goes Apple raising the bar once again.
Does this change one day the way we build for the hand held or mobile Web? I don’t know. You’d have to have the iPhone take the market by storm like the iPod, and I don’t think they’ll have the price point or the market share.
But, as Dave Hyatt of Apple fame points out, there’s other WebKit browsers and Opera is getting bigger and bigger. So there’s also MiniMo, but I don’t know how many vendors are using that.
What does the iPhone mean long term for the Mobile Web?
I think it means that the hand held Web marketplace is just going to look more and more like the desktop market as the phone technology gets more and more sophisticated. Hardly an earth-shattering revelation, but then so do the Web browsers.
So when you get to the point where it really, really matters on a huge scale, maybe there won’t be so much work to do because the browser on the mobile device won’t be that different from the desktop? I don’t know, uh, maybe. Maybe not. There’s still screen real estate concerns, etc.
Again, as with a lot of things, only time will tell, but it’s still interesting to watch.
Link fodder for you:
Jan 13, 02:45 PM in Web Development (filed under Browsers, Mobile-and-Handheld)
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rob Jan 14, 05:21 PM #
Just some follow up linkage:
- In Japan, barely a ripple
- Kottke.org: iPhone round-up
Interesting stuff.