Blimey! Hey, Bert - you see this news on the telly today? Yeah, tarts. It says ere that iPhone is kicking Nokia’s bum something awful in the browser business - a real flogging as it were. Some blokes at a firm called StatCounter is sayin it’ll overtake Nokia soon in mobile web share, and you know how the Finns are about losing.
Remember what they did when they lost the world cup soccer championship? Helsinki burned to the ground, it did. Bloody business that was. God save Safari.
Avi Greengart, Research Director for market research firm Current Analysis, says Adobe’s Flash player performs poorly on iPhone, in its current incarnation, proving more trouble than it’s worth.
“There is no question the iPhone delivers a compelling Web experience and there are good reasons to want Flash in there, but Flash Lite wouldn’t give you the Web experience you’re looking for.”
The jixt of this statement, as we’ve known for some time, is that Adobe’s Flash Lite player comes with a high resource overhead, taxing the processor as well as battery life. Or so Apple claims. Forces are at work behind the scenes to develop a more optimized solution to bring native Flash content to iPhone users.
Much as I sometimes lament the absence of Flash, I don’t see it as a crucial feature. So long as some method exists for scraping content from YouTube, as it does now. That said, having no Flash support is yet one more missing feature that Apple haters will use as fodder for flinging rotten fruit at the device.
Jamie Lendino of PC Mag logs his thoughts on how iPhone might be the catalyst that brings about the demise of what we know as the “Mobile internet”. I thought WAP was already dead? Not dead perhaps, but its zombified corpse crawls upon the ground, with flies and maggots feeding upon its rotting flesh.
The assertion in this story is that, unlike browsers found on Smartphones and feature phones, Safari renders real webpages like the desktop browser that it is, not the pipsqueak micro webpages you get on those other devices. Ergo, iPhone makes all that irrelevant.
Could iPhone spell doom for the Mobile web? Not by itself. OSX, the brains beneath iPhone’s glossy veneer, is without a doubt a glimpse of things to come on mobile devices. But until desktop class operating become the norm on handsets, WAP or Mobile websites will be around for a long time to come.
Likewise until 3G becomes the norm, there is something to be said for lightweight webpages that download quickly and deliver basic content scaled to low resolution mobile displays.
Death will come, but it will come slowly.
Zimbra has announced mobile account access to iPhone users via it’s new web service front-end called iZimbra. Zimbra, for those of you unfamiliar with the product, is an open source messaging and collaboration solution that is what one might describe as a Microsoft Exchange clone, offering the same functionality and collaboration exchange as Microsoft’s proprietary corporate communication suite.
What iZimbra does is basically bring something very similar to OWA (Outlook Web Access) formatted to iPhones’s mobile browser.
I’ve always been very curious about Zimbra and it looks extremely promising. I subscribe to a hosted Exchange account, so iZimbra is something I would find very compelling and usable were I hooked to Zimbra account.
What’s this? iPhone supports Flash plugin? Just think of the possibilities! This means we’ll be able to watch xTube YouTube video right our iPhone. Or not. Keep a close eye on this story because it is completely unconfirmed by anything other than a product shot used in a TV ad.
Still, since iPhone is running OSX under the hood it’s totally conceivable that Flash is supported. We’ll see.
Via Engadget Mobile
  
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The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
