How the iPhone is Pushing Mobile Web Design Forward
Friday, July 27, 2007
With the introduction of Apple’s iPhone into the U.S. market and the implementation of Safari as its mobile web browser, the question for interactive designers is how will this effect mobile web design and will WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) sites begin a slow death. The North American mobile market place has been relatively slow in innovating the mobile web experience. European and Asian customers have long had high bandwidth networks and mobile phones that can display rich interactive content such as Adobe’s Flash Lite.
The difference is that the iPhone now displays the normal web and by using a zoom in and out feature called Pinch, allows you to quickly read and navigate the site in a very seamless way. This effectively shows you the real web and not a stripped down version or WAP version of the site. Other phones and browsers such as Opera Mini, the S60, the Nokia 770 and N800 have similar styles of web browsers but the iPhone has made it simple and appealing to the mass consumer. Ryan Block from Engadget described the Safari web brower in these terms:
...there’s no question that the iPhone’s build of Safari serves up the most true-to-PC web browsing experience available for a phone today.
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal had this to say about the web browsing experience:
The iPhone is the first smart phone we’ve tested with a real, computer-grade Web browser, a version of Apple’s Safari.
Traditionally, designers and developers would create complete custom sites or single pages to allow users to see and interact with their content via a WAP or mini browser. These pages would be formatted to the small mobile phone screens and in most cases be simple graphic or text versions of the site. Below is a comparison of the Fleming Design Website for both WAP and the iPhone. As you can see the WAP version is mostly text based with limited design opportunities. However the iPhone version is an exact replica of the official online site and provides the viewer with a more accurate representation of our brand.
This transition to only having to create a single site for both online and mobile viewers is a long way from being considered a standard practice. Some technical restricts still remain such as displaying Flash or JavaScript content, but it does give hope to those designers and marketers who wish to provide a consistent brand image across all platforms. With Apple pushing the mobile phone interface forward other competitors will soon jump ahead and help make the mobile web a richer and simpler experience. Giving the interactive designers more flexibility and control over their final products.
