iPhone: The Killer App is Safari

As Steve Jobs keynotes go, today's WWDC kickoff was short on startling news or classic Reality Distortion Field hype. Instead, much of what was new was kind of subtle--and nothing more so than the factoid Jobs saved for last: that the route for third parties to develop iPhone apps is not by writing traditional client software, but by building Ajaxy Web 2.0 services tailored for the iPhone.

In past appearances, Jobs had told us, repeatedly, that the iPhone ran real OS X and real Safari. But he was short enough on specifics that I remained instinctively skeptical, wondering if the iPhone's browser was really a mini-Safari, not unlike the distinctly junior-sized version of IE you get on a Windows Mobile phone.

Nope. Today's demo was the most tangible proof yet that the iPhone will be the first phone with a truly full-blown Web browser. Long-term, I think that's a huge deal--a bigger one than the phone's music and video capabilities, cool though they look in demos.

(Side note: What's the best browser on a currently-shapping phone? I haven't tried 'em all, but the most impressive one I know is the one that comes with Nokia Series 60 phones--which, interestingly, is based on the same open-source KHTML and KJS technologies that Safari builds upon.)

When Steve Jobs mocks the Internet experience provided by current phones as a "baby" version of the Net, he's not really distorting reality. Web sites and services have made gigantic strides in sophistication in the past 18 months, but almost none of those advances benefit anyone who uses the Web on a phone. (Actually, they often hurt phone users, since they often mean that useful sites and services just don't work on phones.)

If iPhone's Safari is rich enough to do Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies, it's rich indeed. That doesn't mean that the experience will be as good as desktop Safari--when a browser's running on a device with a tiny screen and no keyboard, compromise is inevitable. But if iPhone's Safari really does do Web services well, it'll make this phone the most interesting computing platform you can put in your pocket.

And it could have a huge impact on how people extend the functionality of phones, especially if it's only the first feature-rich browser to show up on a phone (and you gotta think that every other phone company will have to react to it quickly).

Today, companies that want to write software for phones need to decide which platforms they'll support. Windows Mobile? Symbian? Palm? Java? Then they need to figure out how to distribute their software--a matter that's complicated by the fact that cell phone carriers generally do very little to encourage their customers to buy software that isn't distributed through carriers themselves.

As Jobs said, iPhone programming doesn't involve a special iPhone SDK or arcane iPhone-related expertise--it's just Web programming. That makes the decision to write stuff for the iPhone much simpler. It also means that if other phone companies move to full-blown browsers, a single service might run on many platforms with little or no tweaking. And it also simplifies the acquisition of software--it's a heck of a lot simpler to hop to a URL on your phone than to buy an application, then download it to a phone and install it there.

(On the other hand, folks are generally willing to pay for client software that does something useful, but the same people are far less likely to pay for a service. Wonder if developers of Safari-based apps will be able to convince iPhone users to shell out real money fr them?)

There are still lots of questions about Safari that we probably won't be able to answer until we try it for ourselves. One I have is whether existing Web apps--say, the Meebo IM client--will work without modification on the iPhone. Even if they don't, it seems a safe bet that some (and maybe many) will do whatever tweaking's necessary to run well on an iPhone.

And here's another question: How long will it be until iPhone Safari has some sort of offline functionality, so services built for it can run when you don't have an Internet connection? Google says it's working on a Safari version of Gears, its new browser plug-in for offline access. If Google makes Gears work on an iPhone--and it might well, given that it's both an Apple-friendly company and one that's serious about mobile devices--the iPhone could wind up as an even more striking advance on current phones than it will if Safari is merely as powerful as it seems to be.

OK, another question: Will the fact that the iPhone isn't a 3G phone--it runs on AT&T's relatively pokey, last-generation EDGE--hobble its usefulness as a Web-services client? You gotta think it'd be better suited to such applications if it had a truly high-speed connection, but will EDGE be adequate, or painful? Again, only hands-on time with the iPhone will tell.

All in all, though, I'm more excited about this phone than I was 24 hours ago. No matter how slick its iPod features are, the iPhone is unlikely to replace my current iPod, since its storage maxes out at only 8GB. And as an iPod, the iPhone will be exactly what Apple thinks it should be--no more, no less.

But with this morning's news, the iPhone has gone from a device that looked to be locked down, at least upon initial release, to one with potentially infinite possibilities. Especially if that on-screen keyboard isn't as clunky as I'm worried it's going to be...