MobileStartup.com

Here are some random thoughts/observations about the iPhone now that it's launched. As someone who has a daily hands-on experience with a ton of different mobile devices, hopefully I've got something to add to what's already been written.

- EDGE network. No thanks. You couldn't get me to plop down $50 for an EDGE phone, let alone $500. I don't want to hear about WiFi either. WiFi is not a mobile technology and I need to connect when I am mobile. I use my phone to connect my laptp to the internet when I'm on the road (don't think you can do that with the iPhone either, for sure not with Bluetooth like my LG CU500)

- SIM Cards. I've seen it written in a few places on the web that you can't take the SIM out of the iPhone. Yes you can. The iPhone is using OEM parts, and an OEM SIM cradle, just like every other phone. Just poke a paperclip in the little hole on top and your SIM will pop out. Maybe you still have the paperclip you used with your first Mac for getting 3 inch floppies out of the drive.

- AT&T's data network was down (in Seattle at least) today from around 12:00 til 2:00 ish. I and several others that I checked with weren't able to get any data at all on phones or iPhones. We weren't able to get any data even in the downtown AT&T store. Was this due to the sudden influx of iPhone owners using their phones for the first time away from their WiFi networks?

- No iSync over Bluetooth? (Yes, I'd like to return this iPhone please.)

- Not to be totally negative; the user interface is stunning. This is definitely the best iPod ever.

If you are doing mobile device/browser detection on your web/app server, how should you be treating the iPhone? Well, first off here is what the User-Agent for the iPhone looks like:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3


For statistics purposed you might want to be detecting this as a phone or PDA, but for rendering it should be treated just as any desktop browser; one that doesn't support flash. There is no WML or xHTML-MP support, and from a mobile content provider standpoint, there is not a lot you can do with the iPhone. Just feed it regular HTML or xHTML pages.

Also note that the iPhone is not using the AT&T mobile gateway so you are not going to get any of the headers that tip you off that it's a mobile device; not even an x-up-subno. Good thing it supports cookies, although as always I recommend session tracking for all mobile devices using URL rewriting.

Right now it's obvious that the iPhone is coming from AT&T, but as other network operators launch it, it may become difficult to detect the network operator due to lack of headers. You can track the remote-host or remote-addr, but if the phone is in WiFi mode, you are going to end up with Host/IP data that doesn't map to a network operator.