With the new (and hot) Apple iPhone on the market, web designers might be considering what they should do to accommodate the fast growing audience of iPhones users.
In a nutshell: probably not too much.
The iPhone web browser, is Apples’ Safari and it reads any web pages - even table-based websites! Gasp! Web standards zealots around the world are eating crow now.
Anyway …
It will come down to what kind of site you are running; I think that most websites will not be the target of iPhone users while on the go. My guess, is that it will be limited to:
- Social networking sites.
- News sites.
- Mapping applications.
At the end of the day, surfing the web on hand held devices will always be limited by the small screens. Though the iPhone has a kick-ass browser and all, I think the nerd-euphoria will pass in time when people realize that surfing the Web on a tiny device ain’t much fun.
… Especially with those heavy data cost!
What about the new Blackberry Bold?
The new Bold from Rim has a lot of smartphone gadgetry that make nerds happy:
- Camera
- MP3 player
- Better Web browser
But I don’t think these extra capabilities will really be that important for most Blackberry users. … They just need to send emails easily and quickly.
So for most web designers, I don’t think you should be so concerned about the Bold, because the Bold is for business and not for surfing the Web.
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
It’s funny that you bring this up. Last night I was trying to use the Facebook application to find the address to a party I was going to and realized that the Facebook iPhone app doesn’t support events!
Then I went to the Facebook iPhone site, and it didn’t display address data for events either.
Safari’s mobile web browser is so good that I found myself just using that to navigate the old Facebook page.
The short of it is, if you’re not providing added value in the UI experience, don’t bother with a shiny new front-end to your web app for iPhone applications.