With the recent launch of the iPhone in the UK, suddenly we’re getting a spate of “we’ve optimised what we do for the iPhone” announcements.
For example, Sky News has an iPhone friendly home page, while the BBC has streamlined its podcasts page for iPhones.
A couple of things to say about this:
1) Isn’t the point of the Safari browser on the iPhone that it can handle ordinary webpages without them having to be specially formated?
2) Why does the iPhone get special attention? Surely these sort of optimisations should be happening for all mobile clients?
OK. So both the BBC and Sky already have excellent mobile versions of their websites, and I know that producing these pages is probably just a little tinkering with some previously created templates via their content management systems.
But we’re entering dangerous territory if we’re expecting website creators to launch new versions of websites for every new devices that hits the market. I quite fancy one of those Asus Eee PCs which have very small screens. They’re selling bucketloads, so can everyone please make their websites look nice for that device – making full use of the screen’s fairly limited real estate? The BBC blog notes that other devices are coming soon. So which device has more in the market in the UK currently? The iPhone or the PSP? And which one has gets the new podcast page. Hmm. It’s not like anyone’s going to be downloading podcasts on the iPhone via EDGE anyway…
And no, this website is not optimised for the iPhone or any mobile device. There’s a very slow redesign happening, and a mobile version may or may not be part of it depending on how hard it is to read. Let’s face it, you’re reading this text via your favourite RSS reader anyway!