Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Apple's new iPhone

Well Apple finally got around to showing their iPhone and first glimpses of it are a mix of good and bad. As a device, I believe it will give the usual mobile manufacturers a kick up the arse to produce better quality user experiences especially when it comes to richer media.

I think this has a huge impact on the future of the mobile web. The easiest way to navigate on smaller devices (as I always believed with my old Palm handheld) is to point at the link you want to follow and not scroll through endless options. Question is, does this change things like the Mobile Web Best Practices or not? It all depends on how other device manufacturers respond to this as not everyone will be bothered in buying such as device as their mobile phone. But as we know these devices have a habit of convergence.

I think if this device can work with 3G as well as other protocols it could be the first device to offer a better seemless experience between on device and off device services. Such as during a video clip, you can go off to watch another or jump over to the web site, say with film trailers as an example. At the moment I think it has been designed with the US market in mind, whether we will see a variation on it for the European market, we will await and see.