Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Not a surprise...

So Apple iPhone controls over 66% of all mobile web use.

This does not surprise me at all as the difference between iPhone and other mobile web browsers is that iPhone works and they do not.

Palm ships the treo with an attrocious browser called blaser that seems to have been designed to use as much data service as possible. On the Palm you ask to download a page, wait two minutes, click a link, wait another two minutes, go back to your first page to go to the next link, wait two minutes for it to reload and so on.

It really does not take a great browser to eat into Apple's share. All it really takes is a browser that is not shitty.

And don't get me started on the Wap phone lunacy that had idiots thinking people would queue up to surf the web on a device with a display the size of a postage stamp and a browser that costs $1 to download the front page of CNN.

The mobile Web is about two things, one is access to relevant information, the other is the ability to perform relevant transactions. The key here being relevant. I might buy a book from Amazon on the iPhone, I am not going to do extensive comparison shopping. I might look up flight times, delays and so on, I am less likely to do online banking unless it is critical to do it right then and there.

The mobile web is not a replacement for the armchair web which is why ideas like walled gardens and such make no sense at all.

1 comment:

kr said...

You forgot to link to the Dilbert cartoon