Apple is expected to announce an iPhone for AT&T’s 3G cellular networks in early June, a major step up for current iPhone owners with Apple’s Safari Web browser on AT&T’s EDGE network.
According to several reports, iPhone has sparked new, much more intense browsing activity by its users compared to other smartphones, though much of that activity seems to be done over the iPhone’s Wi-Fi connection. Some of the increase, at least, seems to be due to iPhone’s touch interface, perhaps the first that truly comes close to deserving that over-worked claim “intuitive.”
Mobile phone browsing, though it suffers from cellular bandwidth limitations actually offers a surprisingly wide choice. In addition to Apple’s Safari, Research in Motion offers its own BlackBerry browser on its handsets (Insurer Aflac used it); Microsoft has a mobile IE; Opera has two: Opera Mobile for smartphones, and Opera Mini for lower-end “feature phones”; Bitstream has recently introduced a mobile browser called ThunderHawk.
Some of these offer various on-device tricks to make it simpler to move around a full HTML page that can only be partially displayed on a smartphone screen. Others exploit various acceleration techniques to speed up HTML downloading and rendering.
How important is the smartphone Web browser for enterprise deployments? So far, most mobile applications for enterprise use seem to be native applications running on the handsets, not Web applications.
Do you evaluate and test the different browser offerings…or will you in the future?
If the enterprise focus is on the application, not the device, do you think the mobile browser will become a key selection factor – one that could determine or heavily influence which device and OS platform the enterprise chooses?
Are YOU using a mobile browser? If so, which one and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
