The screen shot on the left is of the Weather.com site on a Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC (Professional Edition). The screen shot on the left is the same site tweaked for the iPhone on an iPod touch. Although it takes a lot longer to load on the iPod touch (both devices were on the same WiFi network although the Pocket PC was limited to 802.11b vs. the 802.11g for the iPod touch), the iPhone version sure looks a lot nicer and provides a lot of functionality without scrolling up and down.
Microsoft has a lot of work to do to bring the Windows Mobile Internet Explorer browser into the 21st century. The iPhone has clearly inspired a lot of firms and their web designers to maximize web-impact for the iPhone’s Safari browser in a way that we have not seen previously for other web-enabled mobile devices.
Microsoft’s announcements of more enterprise mobile-enabling products for 2008 is good for the enterprise. But, again, that is clearly not where most of us are these days even if we work for a large organization. Microsoft really needs to focus on the basics and fix the broken stories at that level: Internet Explorer, ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center, and alarms are just a few of the basics that need fixing.
Comments
2 responses to “The Have and Have Nots: Windows Mobile vs. iPhone Sites”
Randy: To the contrary. While I do not claim to be a “typical” PDA/phone user, I do know a number of non-techie people who depend on having Word documents and Excel spreadsheets available on their Pocket PC Phone Edition or Smartphone (as of WiMo6 in any case). I myself use Excel nearly daily on my Windows Mobile devices and use Word several times a week.
Good web design shows on nearly all platforms. Since many sites are already in the process of tweaking their sites for mobile access of all sorts then adding a few bells for the iPhone is pretty easy.
While the idea of a enterprise ready mobile device sounds good do you really want to work on desktop type apps on the small screens of mobile devices?
While Active Directory, remote access and ACL makes sense for laptops, the usefulness on mobile devices like phones and PDA’s is questionable. Perhaps the best use of mobile devices in the enterprise would be messaging. You probably don’t need to open documents on your mobile device but attaching them to messages by having access to your desktop files via active directory makes more sense.