Holiday and the dreaded i-word

Wa-hey! Vacation starts today! I really, really needed this...

Anyway, everybody and their cousin seems to be excited over the iPhone. Reading through a lot of the stuff made me think that maybe the iPhone is a revolution. But the revolution comes with the Web, not the phone. Many companies are making sure their web sites now work with the iPhone, and quite a few of the movers and shakers of the Web 2.0 world are getting one. This probably means that for the first time, the Web crowd will start to seriously think about mobility. So far the attempts have just been mostly about really crappy downconverters that make me cringe every time I try to use the fully capable web browser I have in my phone.

Even though Nokia S60 phones use the same browser as the iPhone (and have been for a year now), the phones are not carried by the operators in the US in any significant numbers. Therefore the Silicon Valley-centric crowd has not really seen what mobility could really be about. In many ways, the mobility has so far been stuck an pre-Web text era: news, chat, email. If you needed the web, you could always use your Macbook with the nearest Wifi hotspot. Now, you gotta start thinking about accessing the web service while you are truly mobile, which means doing things like turning it into a background thing, something which does not grab your entire attention when you're using it; and really thinking about usability.

I really hope I'm right, because that would mean web services which are actually usable on a small screen and a tiny device. No matter how good Apple's engineering is, those two things they won't be able to bypass. But if it is enough to nudge the web developers into thinking about mobility, then in my book Apple has scored a success, no matter how many (or few) devices they sell.



Comments

With this new wave a couple of cats are out of the bag. for example you get a 200 text limit on your text, but now all you have to do is goto meebo on safari and text for free. This of course would hurt ATT and I don't think they realized it. Now as for the third party apps I don't think anyone will be skypeing anytime soon. True the technology exists but its being suppressed here, by the big companies. I had ICQ in 1999 nobody around me heard of it, "what would you want that for? we have AOL". as for Skype there are cases all around the country where quality of the broadband is being intentionally suppressed.

To get Back to your Point. I agree with you, I think your going to see a following of mini browsing compatibility. Perhaps something like Parallel websites with mostly text.

--Butch, 03-Jul-2007

I'm also interested to see what OpenMoko brings to the picture. In other words, to see if it will pass the geek group and move to the mainstream.

--ChuckSmith, 10-Jul-2007

Yup. OpenMoko is certainly very interesting.

--JanneJalkanen, 10-Jul-2007


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"Main_blogentry_020707_1" last changed on 02-Jul-2007 19:25:52 EEST by JanneJalkanen.