just read terry white's iphone review
http://terrywhite.com/techblog/?p=196
The part on the web browser is nice...
Apple has been making a big deal about the web app Safari on the iPhone. After all I don’t think any other phone (at least not any that I’ve seen) offer a full blown web browsing experience on a tiny screen. The implementation of Safari itself on the iPhone is well done! However, there are some flaws to this strategy. Most cell phone web browsers use WAP. WAP is a way for website designers to design a low bandwidth simple version of their sites. This works well on mobile devices. However, it’s true you don’t get the “full page” experience. Seeing that the iPhone doesn’t support 3g and uses AT&T’s Edge network instead, your pages could load painfully slow. Most commercial websites detect a WAP browser and automatically direct you to a lower bandwidth version of the site without all the frills. Since the iPhone uses a full version of Safari, that won’t happen automatically. So you’re going to get the regular site with all the graphics, etc.
It was interesting that Apple used Fandago.com during the introduction of the iPhone. I hadn’t really used this site much, but I wanted a good movie theater listing site to be able to call up movie times quickly from the iPhone. I went to www.fandango.com and found that while it works perfectly fine, it was too many clicks to get to my theater and too many unnecessary graphics. In this case I’m only interested in a text listing. Sure I could bookmark the page that has my local theater on it and that saves on the clicks, but it still loads a bunch of graphics that I don’t need. Luckily Fandango has a mobile version of their site which if you go to mobile.fandango.com you’ll see what I mean. It much more streamlined and loads much faster. So from the mobile version I bookmarked the two theaters I go to the most and they load very quickly. The same is going to hold true for www.nwa.com vs. mobile.nwa.com.
Apple also did some clever things to help you get your URL typed faster. They give you the buttons you’ll need on the virtual keyboard like forward slash, colon and there’s even a .com button. They also do a much nicer job of offering to auto complete the URL in Safari than they do in the other apps. It offers suggestions from your bookmarks. However, what I wish it had was a cursor key. Sometimes I want to edit out part of a URL and it takes me a few taps to get the cursor where I want it.
While I certainly appreciate having a full blown browsing experience in my hand, I also appreciate the fact that it’s not always necessary. Speaking of a full blown browser experience, one glaring omission is the lack of Flash support and gasp, Quicktime support in the iPhone’s Safari browser. Over 98% of the computers on the internet today have the Flash player. This means that content developers can feel pretty assured that if they design a site that incorporates Flash, their content will be seen. Not having Flash or even Flash Lite on the iPhone is a serious drawback. It will be interesting to see which sites won’t work on the iPhone because of this. Rumor has it that Apple posted a job listing for Flash Lite programmers, so maybe we’ll see this in an update at some point. I knew going in that the iPhone didn’t have Flash, but I just took for granted that Apple would support their own Quicktime format. While I can watch the Quicktime clips linked to Apple’s site, I haven’t been able to get it to work on my own sites. I have some QuickTime movies using QuickTime Streaming on my sites and they don’t play or even attempt to play when I click on them. I’ll have to find out what’s going on with this one. So this is to say that you Quicktime viewing experience on the web may vary.
hmmm
http://terrywhite.com/techblog/?p=196
The part on the web browser is nice...
Apple has been making a big deal about the web app Safari on the iPhone. After all I don’t think any other phone (at least not any that I’ve seen) offer a full blown web browsing experience on a tiny screen. The implementation of Safari itself on the iPhone is well done! However, there are some flaws to this strategy. Most cell phone web browsers use WAP. WAP is a way for website designers to design a low bandwidth simple version of their sites. This works well on mobile devices. However, it’s true you don’t get the “full page” experience. Seeing that the iPhone doesn’t support 3g and uses AT&T’s Edge network instead, your pages could load painfully slow. Most commercial websites detect a WAP browser and automatically direct you to a lower bandwidth version of the site without all the frills. Since the iPhone uses a full version of Safari, that won’t happen automatically. So you’re going to get the regular site with all the graphics, etc.
It was interesting that Apple used Fandago.com during the introduction of the iPhone. I hadn’t really used this site much, but I wanted a good movie theater listing site to be able to call up movie times quickly from the iPhone. I went to www.fandango.com and found that while it works perfectly fine, it was too many clicks to get to my theater and too many unnecessary graphics. In this case I’m only interested in a text listing. Sure I could bookmark the page that has my local theater on it and that saves on the clicks, but it still loads a bunch of graphics that I don’t need. Luckily Fandango has a mobile version of their site which if you go to mobile.fandango.com you’ll see what I mean. It much more streamlined and loads much faster. So from the mobile version I bookmarked the two theaters I go to the most and they load very quickly. The same is going to hold true for www.nwa.com vs. mobile.nwa.com.
Apple also did some clever things to help you get your URL typed faster. They give you the buttons you’ll need on the virtual keyboard like forward slash, colon and there’s even a .com button. They also do a much nicer job of offering to auto complete the URL in Safari than they do in the other apps. It offers suggestions from your bookmarks. However, what I wish it had was a cursor key. Sometimes I want to edit out part of a URL and it takes me a few taps to get the cursor where I want it.
While I certainly appreciate having a full blown browsing experience in my hand, I also appreciate the fact that it’s not always necessary. Speaking of a full blown browser experience, one glaring omission is the lack of Flash support and gasp, Quicktime support in the iPhone’s Safari browser. Over 98% of the computers on the internet today have the Flash player. This means that content developers can feel pretty assured that if they design a site that incorporates Flash, their content will be seen. Not having Flash or even Flash Lite on the iPhone is a serious drawback. It will be interesting to see which sites won’t work on the iPhone because of this. Rumor has it that Apple posted a job listing for Flash Lite programmers, so maybe we’ll see this in an update at some point. I knew going in that the iPhone didn’t have Flash, but I just took for granted that Apple would support their own Quicktime format. While I can watch the Quicktime clips linked to Apple’s site, I haven’t been able to get it to work on my own sites. I have some QuickTime movies using QuickTime Streaming on my sites and they don’t play or even attempt to play when I click on them. I’ll have to find out what’s going on with this one. So this is to say that you Quicktime viewing experience on the web may vary.
hmmm
