Not having used — or even seen, for that matter — Apple’s iPhone, the post that follows may be well be completely uninformed and ignorant. You have been warned. 😉
I know, roughly, what the size of an iPhone is. And roughly the size of the screen, too.
How is the iPhone something you’d want to browse the Internet on?
I’ve installed a plugin for WordPress, called iwPhone, that reformats my blog as a whole for iPhone users. It seems to work — the files in question have been used on occasion — but I have no idea what it actually looks like.
But that’s not what I’m actually wondering about.
Most of my iPhone hits come through TrekBBS.
Now, I don’t like using TrekBBS on a desktop browser with lots of space. The only way I find TrekBBS useful and not annoying is to content block the ads away (and it’s a freaky experience to use someone else’s computer to access the bulletin board and see the ads every freaking where).
Now, it could well be that the iPhone’s implementation of Safari filters the hell out of stuff. Things like TrekBBS’ banner ads are quantized out of existence, perhaps. It is possible. I just don’t really know.
It does seem to me that as more people take up the mobile web that websites will begin to be designed with special features for the mobile browser in mind for accessibility reasons.
But right now? I can’t imagine using TrekBBS on a handheld platform that would fit in the palm of my hand. It doesn’t seem possible to me. :vogon:
As an iPhone user, I can say that it’s not as cumbersome as you might think. Remind me to show you at Farpoint.
The Safari seems as fully-functional as the version I had on the Mac. One thing they don’t tell you or even illustrate in the commercials, you can zoom in on sections of the web page in particular.
The keyboard DOES take getting used to, but after using at Treo for two years, it’s not that much of a change, IMO.
I’ve seen the iPhone in action, and it’s pretty sweet. The keyboard *does* look like it takes some getting used to (my stocky fingers can’t seem to hit the right keys right off the bat; thankfully, you can continue to hold down on the keyboard until the correct key is highlighted via a pop-up), and since it runs OSX, Safari is not some scaled-back version (*looks at Pocket Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile*).
And NoScript + Firefox = TrekBBS awesomeness.