Rapid Web News

Will Apple’s release of the iPad slow the surge past few years of mobile web development? Some people think so.

The release of Apple’s ever popular smartphone, the iPhone, back in mid 2007 caused a huge development spike in websites and dynamic web applications designed the mobile devices. Of course, the vast majority of these mobile website were developed specifically with the iPhone in mind, however the results were beneficial to pretty much all smartphones with the capability the browse the web and with some form of web browser application.

So, why do I think the iPad will slow this development in the mobile web market? The iPad is a mobile device itself is it not?

Well, perhaps not. Apple’s iPad does indeed use an operating system very similar to the iPhone, with backwards compatibility with almost all of the iPhone’s downloadable apps, and yes, it is mobile in the true sense of the word – it can be easily carried around unlike a full desktop computer and much more easily than a typically larger and much heavier laptop. However, the one aspect of the iPad which stands out is its native screen resolution of 1024×768. This means that, since most web developers design, template and style their websites for resolutions of either 800×600 or 1024×768, normal websites look fantastic on the iPad.

Why build an iPad specific ‘mobile’ version of a website when your existing site works perfectly, fills the screen and looks fantastic?

A lot of web developers will find no need to. However, sites that use heavy amounts of Flash content may be required to rethink their design and implementation strategy when it comes to Flash websites on Apple products. This is because the neither the iPhone or the iPad, at time of writing, support Flash in websites and so rely more so on the ever increasing use of interactive JavaScript elements via programming technologies such as AJAX.

If you’re interested in getting a design done for Apple products, be it the iPhone, iPad or just any Macintosh system, take a look at our website’s web design section. Hopefully it will spike your interest.

Hong Kong Hardware giant Lenovo announced plans for their own take on the Smartphone earlier this month. It will be android based and have a clamshell design. I must admit it does look pretty funky and will carry all the features that the big hitters have. China is looking to see its first handsets around may this year and then pushed out to a host of other countries towards q3, although no confirmation that the UK will see this particular handset. It will have a great looking screen with a superb resolution of 800 x 480, a full ‘qwerty’ keyboard mounted via the clamshell configuration but get this, the phone will detach from this allowing you to carry half the phone! Ok, so not sure how useful that will be but we all like to see something out of the ‘norm’.