iPhone baby internet?
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in his Macworld 2007 keynote address, one of the main selling points was the iPhone's ability to provide the »full« internet experience.
Apple marketing in general and Jobs in particular have since tried to really hammer home this point, ridiculing "smartphones" for providing only a »baby-internet« experience.
Fine by me - but it makes me wonder what we are then supposed to make of all the "iPhone-only" websites that currently seem to mushroom.
That is not the »full« internet either, is it?
Let me be clear: I am not out to bash Apple in general or the iPhone in particular. The iPhone seems like a pretty decent phone with an exceptional GUI and I certainly would not mind owning one.
What triggered this post is this: I first came across appmarks.com and later found a list of iPhone web apps at LifeHacker.com. "These apps are just web pages … plain ol' HTML", I thought to myself - "The iPhone uses the real internet - and so does my Nokia N95! Why, the browsers on these two phones even share the same code base!".
It did not work:-(
Most of the apps cannot be used on a device like my N95. Not even when I use it in landscape mode, which makes its screen as wide as the iPhone's screen. At the moment I cannot be bothered to check out the technicalities causing this incompatibility - I just note how these apps do not display properly, refuse to accept my input or are unresponsive when I click links.
So much for the real or full internet.
It seems to me we now have (at least) three internets: the baby smartphone internet Steve Jobs talked about in his Macworld 2007 keynote; the baby iPhone internet, the baby-Jesus-Talladega-Nights-internet and lastly the *real* internet. If you are going to somehow make money on the "mobile" internet, which of the above is it going to be?
Here are some applications that worked on my N95:
Here are some applications that did not work:
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