(yet more) iPhone thoughts
Jul. 30th, 2008 12:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikThe 2.0 software on the iPhone works quite nicely with all three major connectivity points at the office: WiFi (PEAP-authenticated WPA2 enterprise with a custom certificate), VPN (standard Cisco IPSEC running on an ASA5500 series) and Exchange (2003 server). However, setting up all those parts is just enough of a pain in the tail that I feared for the average office-user having to figure it out. Luckily Apple provides an Enterprise Deployment toolset for free. I downloaded it and played with it a little bit last weekend. A simple configuration and a few certificate installations later, and I had a nice little profile to install on one of the corporate webservers.
Having this profile ready on Monday turned out to be good timing since the local Apple and AT&T stores got a big allocation of stock in that day. By this morning there were a half-dozen new iPhone users in the company all clamoring for access with probably a dozen more to come later in the week. Instead of having to peck through all the phones one by one I just gave them the URL and away they went. Once they've authenticated (the same way they would authenticate for their email or VPN client) it sets everything up and away they go. I know it's silly, but that tool really does make my day. Now they can all use internal web resources, get push email/contacts/calendars and all that jazz with almost no work on my part.
I don't really know how I ended up being the company's primary "iPhone tech" but it's kind of fun.
~~~~~
My other observation is about the mobile-Safari web client in the phone.
I've been working with smartphones ever since I picked up a Nokia Communicator 9000 back in early 1997. I've gone back and forth between many different phones and operating systems and until the most recent WinMo devices the've all pretty much had terrible web browsers. Nokia's had a few decent ones lately and WinMo is almost there... but the iPhone browser beat them all, hands down. It still amazes me just how well the web 'works' on mobile safari, compared to a decade+ of other smartphones.
Here's the freaky (to me, at least) part, though: through all that time there have been a number of attempts to make the web 'smarphone browser friendly'. WAP, MobileWeb, .mobi, 'customized for windows mobile' sites, you name it. None have really taken off to any great degree. Sure, there were specialized sites and such... but the things I used every day? Nope, most major sites had only the 'full web version' that never quite loaded well on a phone's browser.
But nowadays? The iPhone has only been out for a year and the number of "iPhone ready" websites always catches me by surprise. My bank, my credit union, the local theaters and even my grocery store all have iPhone-ready websites. Tonight I found out that even Deviant Art is iPhone-aware, reformatting its pages to work beautifully on the little phone's browser. News sites, e-commerce sites... more and more each month.
This is somewhat counter-intuitive as the iPhone's browser is good enough that it really doesn't need to have a custom-formatted website for it to work well. Even so, here are all these companies going out of their way to explicitly support the device to the point of optimizing their sites to work with it! I don't see Apple out there pushing this 'iPhone ready' standard or anything, either (but admittedly, I could just be missing it). Companies are just choosing to be iPhone ready. After waiting so long to see a real 'mobile web' start working, the speed at which this mini-browser format is being adopted kinda freaks me out.
My big question now is, of course, how much I'm seeing things through "iPhone colored glasses". Are more companies supporting mobile browser formats in general these days? Are sites commonly "sidekick ready" or "blackberry ready" because it's just easier to do that with modern web technology? Or is the "let's all support the iPhone" kick really as strong as I'm seeing it here?
Having this profile ready on Monday turned out to be good timing since the local Apple and AT&T stores got a big allocation of stock in that day. By this morning there were a half-dozen new iPhone users in the company all clamoring for access with probably a dozen more to come later in the week. Instead of having to peck through all the phones one by one I just gave them the URL and away they went. Once they've authenticated (the same way they would authenticate for their email or VPN client) it sets everything up and away they go. I know it's silly, but that tool really does make my day. Now they can all use internal web resources, get push email/contacts/calendars and all that jazz with almost no work on my part.
I don't really know how I ended up being the company's primary "iPhone tech" but it's kind of fun.
My other observation is about the mobile-Safari web client in the phone.
I've been working with smartphones ever since I picked up a Nokia Communicator 9000 back in early 1997. I've gone back and forth between many different phones and operating systems and until the most recent WinMo devices the've all pretty much had terrible web browsers. Nokia's had a few decent ones lately and WinMo is almost there... but the iPhone browser beat them all, hands down. It still amazes me just how well the web 'works' on mobile safari, compared to a decade+ of other smartphones.
Here's the freaky (to me, at least) part, though: through all that time there have been a number of attempts to make the web 'smarphone browser friendly'. WAP, MobileWeb, .mobi, 'customized for windows mobile' sites, you name it. None have really taken off to any great degree. Sure, there were specialized sites and such... but the things I used every day? Nope, most major sites had only the 'full web version' that never quite loaded well on a phone's browser.
But nowadays? The iPhone has only been out for a year and the number of "iPhone ready" websites always catches me by surprise. My bank, my credit union, the local theaters and even my grocery store all have iPhone-ready websites. Tonight I found out that even Deviant Art is iPhone-aware, reformatting its pages to work beautifully on the little phone's browser. News sites, e-commerce sites... more and more each month.
This is somewhat counter-intuitive as the iPhone's browser is good enough that it really doesn't need to have a custom-formatted website for it to work well. Even so, here are all these companies going out of their way to explicitly support the device to the point of optimizing their sites to work with it! I don't see Apple out there pushing this 'iPhone ready' standard or anything, either (but admittedly, I could just be missing it). Companies are just choosing to be iPhone ready. After waiting so long to see a real 'mobile web' start working, the speed at which this mini-browser format is being adopted kinda freaks me out.
My big question now is, of course, how much I'm seeing things through "iPhone colored glasses". Are more companies supporting mobile browser formats in general these days? Are sites commonly "sidekick ready" or "blackberry ready" because it's just easier to do that with modern web technology? Or is the "let's all support the iPhone" kick really as strong as I'm seeing it here?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 08:01 am (UTC)But, as far as everything else is concerned, I LOVE the iPhone. I am a bit saddened that the update was released so soon after I bought mine, but eventually (maybe after FC) I will upgrade and probably pass my iPhone on to Saman.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 10:53 am (UTC)The iPhone's browser is also a standardized experience - which makes web design a LOT easier. Making a site that scales gracefully across a widely varying range of handheld devices is a bitch, especially when your testing suite is probably going to be 'whatever phones I can get my hands on around the office' and a few simulators. Every iPhone has the same screen and the same browser.
Good point
Date: 2008-08-02 04:48 pm (UTC)Generally speaking, iPhone buyers are willing to spend money chasing fashion. That combination makes advertising to Newton users particularly effective. I suspect that iPhone-specific commercial websites have little difficulty selling ads.
Apple has made it easy to develop iPhone web sites, web apps, and native applications. In fact, some developers say it's even fun. So a developer who gets an iPhone may be more likely to become an iPhone developer than, say, another developer who buys a Symbian-based phone.
The iPhone's display is large enough to enable a reasonable web-browsing experience, but still small enough that optimizations can improve the experience. This isn't so much a matter of pixel resolution, just physical size. On my Nokia 770, which has a slightly larger 800x480 display, plenty of websites fit reasonably on the screen, but the text is unreadably small-- so even with two or three times the iPhone's pixel density, custom websites would be useful. On the other hand, the displays of most other cellphones, including the Treo 650 I used before buying the iPhone, are just too small for good web browsing even with significant optimization, so most web developers just don't bother.
. png