Elsewhere on the 'Net - Mobile phones

iPhone Tech Talk

After the JS Core, John gives an interesting overview of the limitations of the iPhone; especially when it comes to JavaScript.

Mobile phones | Permalink

iPhone and developing for mobile

David Storey of Opera takes a look at Apple's suggestions for serving CSS to the iPhone. He points out that the iPhone doesn't support media type handheld, which is the correct way of serving style sheets only to handheld devices.

Mobile phones, Opera, Safari | Permalink

So, you want to develop iPhone apps?

John Allsopp's advice for developing sites for the iPhone.

Mobile phones, Safari | Permalink

Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone

Apple's official pages.

Mobile phones, Safari | Permalink

iPhone Web Development Tips and Official Documentation Released

Useful tips and tricks about the iPhone. How do you recognise the user rotating his phone?

Mobile phones, Safari | Permalink

iPhone Javascript and spec benchmark

The first independent iPhone benchmark test, compared with a MacBook Pro. John Murch ran a few online benchmarks, among which my DOM vs. innerHTML one.

Unfortunately we still don't know if these figures can be compared with other browsers due to the Date object problems I posted about earlier.

Nonetheless the comparison between Safari 3 on MacBook Pro and iPhone is (should be) valid. Result: the iPhone is much, much slower (factor 100!). That's much more than I expected, frankly.

Benchmarks, Mobile phones, Safari | Permalink

XHTML disrupted by Mobile access

Turns out some mobile carriers mess with the HTML of web sites. Good to know.

HTML, Mobile phones | Permalink

Make your site mobile friendly

Another article on how to create web pages for mobile phones. While studying it I became aware of the problem in mobile phone development: no data.

Virginia DeBolt gives a solid overview of current thinking on mobile support, but the problem is that the article contains no specific data. (This is not Virginia's fault; no other article I encountered contains specific data, either.)

I'd love to hear stuff like Note that the Ericsson QQMV5 has spotty support for the <blockquote> tag, but I've never yet encountered it, because it seems as if nobody actually tests sites on actual mobile phones (instead of emulators). I don't, either.

Virginia gives links to the Ericsson and Nokia support groups, but astonishingly they contain no data on XHTML support (at least, none that's easily findable). Ericsson natters about WAP as if it's still important, while Nokia's so-called data sheet is remarkeble only for the paucity of data it contains.

In other words, mobile phone browser vendors (with the possible exception of Opera) don't even attempt to document the standards their phone browsers support.

What we'd really need is a solid, well-tested compatibility table for mobile phones. Unfortunately that would require me (or anyone who'd create it) to buy dozens of mobile phones, something I don't have the money for.

So for the moment all "Optimise your site for mobile browsers" articles will continue to give the same advice, drawn from the same, non-mobile-browser-vendor sources, and they will hardly help developers who're searching for specific support details. Again, this is not Virginia's fault (every sigle article I read suffers from the same problem), but it does mean that I'm setting less and less store on such articles. Reality may diverge significantly.

Mobile phones | Permalink