iPhone implications

by Craig Raw

The world's most wanted gadget right now is undoubtedly the iPhone - social media sites are abuzz with its imminent release on 29th June, with one Digg story gathering a massive 23,338 diggs. Hyped to be sure, but after the success of the iPod, it would be foolish to bet against Steve Jobs on this one.

So, if the iPhone is going to become a widespread device (at least in the well-heeled sector), what impact will it have on the technology/communications landscape? First off all, the iPhone will run a stripped down version of Mac OS X, which will likely make it one of the most competent and equipped environments on a mobile. The multi-touch display and large screen are likely to make it easier to use in a PDA role than most current devices - and this is significant, since it is the major stumbling block of using your PDA for just about anything complex. It will run Safari, Apple's web browser (now on Windows too), which will result in a capable browsing experience. And of course, the iPhone brings Apple's legendary design skills to the general purpose handheld.

A significant fact that emerged from Apple's recent WWDC developer's conference is the iPhone SDK - or rather, the lack of one. The iPhone is effectively closed to third party application development (at this time, anyway). This is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, our local mobile communication application providers such as MXit and Yeigo are going to have a hard time penetrating this market, if they can at all. Steve Jobs has said that application security and device stability are the reasons why the iPhone is closed, and while Apple have generally been good in the past at providing developer tools to integrate with their products, mobile carriers have certainly not, and the latter may well be one of the reasons for this decision.

There is, however, one important opportunity here - the best (and indeed only) way to get your application onto the iPhone is via the web. As mentioned, the iPhone comes with a "fully-featured" Safari, and in the US will likely be sold with a compulsory data plan to ensure connectivity. It will display great-looking, standards-compliant HTML. It may or may not run Flash - there are conflicting rumours and speculations about this, so for now it's a case of wait and see. It will probably not run Java. However, it will certainly run Javascript, meaning AJAX apps are an excellent choice. It's here that I see great potential - if you can write a useful application that fits onto a 3.5" multi-touch screen, you are likely to attract a large number of mobile visitors. There may be further opportunities for widget developers to get aboard the platform, given the likes of Dashboard, and the new <canvas> tag shows interesting possibilities. In all, it should be good news for web application developers, and for eMarketing in general - this may be the device that finally makes mobile browsing make sense.

Now, if only we didn't have so long to wait...

2007/06/20 | permalink | comments (3) | trackbacks (0)

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