CharlieRose.com is my favorite video site. Here’s a recent video discussion about the iPhone 3G, with Mike Arrington and Steven Levy, the author of Hackers, a must-read for anyone interested in computers. Here’s my response to the video:
Bigger picture here, most people will pass on these phones. In our society, computer terminals are everywhere, WIFI is everywhere, so an unnecessarily, unreasonably tiny computer is not the solution.
I agree with Steven Levy, it is too early to know where this will go, notice he specifically mentions (despite all the hype) how all the iPhone penetration combined amounts to an insignificant amount of web traffic. What is it, 1%? Most webmasters and app developers will take the time to design for IE and Firefox because that’s where most of the money is.
Laptops are portable enough for most tech-savvy people, you just can’t go much smaller, and this is proven by the response to netbooks. I believe Mike Arrington claims the iPhone’s screen is better than a netbook he tried, but his argument is weak, and stronger, more diverse netbook offerings outnumber anything Apple can contend with.
Would you redesign CharlieRose.com just for the iPhone, knowing it matters to less than 1% of the Internet? This is the iPhone’s problem, not the Internet’s problem. There’s trillions of pages and 15 years worth of apps already out there, the web is the web. So web developers like myself can ignore this thing, because even if it climbs to 5% of all Internet browsing, its ultimate aim will always be to render everything exactly as a desktop/laptop would, because that is the reality of the Internet, the bulk of the information already out there.
This is also why Microsoft Internet Explorer is impossible to ignore, and that will be the case for a very long time, whether or not geeks like it. It’s preposterous to think you can build an app store and own the Internet, this late in the game, with an almost limitless number of apps already out there, coded over the years for ordinary (real) computers, in numerous languages. If you’re writing an app today, XHTML/Javascript with PHP/MySQL on the back-end is the most reasonable, most popular solution, and how you will reach the most people today, and far, far into the future.