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With the iPhone ready to release at the end of the month, Steve Jobs announced that Apple only wants 1% of the mobile web market. That's 1% of over a billion mobile units, not exactly small change. The mobile market is big and growing rapidly.
Apple further announced that its standards-compliant web browser, Safari, is now available in beta for Windows. Some people think these two announcements are related.
The reaction to the beta release of Safari for Windows has been mixed. Burningbird reports that it works fine for her. But other users are reporting crashes and various problems. The security people are predicting a bonanza for virus and malware makers. Keep in mind, it's a beta.
The connection to iPhone is that iPhone uses Safari. Mobile web + Safari + Windows. Are you filling in the equals sign and a dollar amount with lots of zeros? An article at Web Directions today called Safari the equivalent of Mosiac (the very first browser) for the mobile web. Here's the reasoning:
Many web developers have been waiting a long time for the fabled mobile web to arrive. From WAP 1.0, we’ve been anticipating the web we can take everywhere, on mobile phones and similar devices.
A lot of people have been waiting the iPhone with extraordinary enthusiasm. Today Apple made two announcements which I think will have enormous impact on the future of the mobile web.
1. Webapps are the way for developers to write apps for the iPhone. But why that’s important is that they will run in Safari, the heart of which, Webkit, is an open source, highly standards compliant rendering engine, used not only in Safari, but in browsers like Nokia’s open source S60 platform.
2. Safari is now available on Windows (XP and Vista), so whether your primary platform for development is Mac or Windows (with Linux you aren’t quite out of luck, as KHTML shares a lot of common functionality at its core with Safari), you have a standards compliant browser that will also allow you to target the iPhone.
Right now the iPhone comes at two price levels: $500 or $600. That will bar a lot of people from getting one. Plus the fact that you have to agree to a two-year contract with AT&T to use it. However, I think over time this will change. I have reasons.
- The iPhone uses a wireless web. Always there at no extra charge and not tied to any home internet account.
- The iPhone is capable of doing a whole lot of things, particularly email and web surfing, that many people now do with more expensive home computers.
- You could write blog posts from anywhere using an iPhone.
Like the people who no longer have land line phones and rely on their mobile phone alone, I think eventually people will use an iPhone or something like it to replace a home computer.
Even if it is only 1% of the market, and Blackberry or Windows Mobile or Palm remain tough competition, the iPhone will change the way we do things, just as surely as the iPod/iTunes combination has.
