So Apple announced the new iPhone yesterday. I got this photo from Engadget; it's one of dozen's they've got.
What does the iPhone have to do with web hosting? Nothing, I thought. Until I read Raju Vegesna's comments: the iPhone runs OSX and Safari. It's got built-in WiFi. Its owners are going to "regularly and practically" use web apps. Raju says this makes Safari support a priority for Zoho.
It matters to you, too. And your customers. Liam built a .mobi site a few weeks ago. It's easily viewable on my Blackberry Pearl - but by this June, there might be a lot more web browsing on the iPhone versus the Pearl.
Obviously not everybody's going to have an iPhone right away, but I think its safe to consider this the first in a series of very viable mobile Web browsing devices that will make using the Web from a mobile device more of a standard-formatting experience.
It doesn't KILL the .mobi domain, but it certainly gives it a shelf life. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the kind of person who would want to browse the Web remotely would mostly be doing it from an iPhone or a device like it within, say, three years.
Then again, maybe it just solidifies the .mobi domain's purpose. Maybe three years from now when I'm bitterly browsing from my recently-purchased Blackberry, I'll find all the .mobi domain a useful indicatior of a Web site that caters to my simplified browser.
In the end, I think the phone-using population will be divided into (a) people who don't want to browse - their phones are phones, and won't be used for accessing websites, .mobi or otherwise, and (b) people who browse regular sites with regular browsers. Which doesn't give .mobi a bright future.
And you're right. Speaking as somebody who never got around to getting a "smart" phone, the iPhone is just the sort of thing that could pull me over. I mean, my reaction was pretty much "wow."
They are pretty indisputably awesome. Even just as a media device. And even if the "phone" aspect is just a bonus, it still could result in more people like me having powerful mobile Web-browsing devices in their pockets in a year or two.
iPhone? Of course, like all good geeks, I want one. The price is a little stiff, but we've all made enough money on AAPL stock to afford one... :)
But dotMobi is monitoring the advancement of the technology. Today they have the "Switch On! Guide" for the WEB-browsing sites. The version 1 has just 3 mandatory rules. So keep it simple to allow most of the current mobile phones to access to the dotMobi sites.
dotMobi has announced, they will review the "Switch On! Guide" as technology goes forward and update it as needed.
The good news is, that to most of the current mobile phones can access all the dotMobi sites (have a look of them at:
http://showcase.mtld.mobi/information.html )
It is true, that the latest web-browsers in mobile phones (like Apple Safari) is a great improvement for the users.