In the wee hours of this morning my 11 month old son was in bed with us and in an effort to squeeze a few more minutes of sleep out of the night I was showing him the photos on my iPhone. I would use a simple swiping motion with my finger and he’d mimic the action until he was going through the photo album. Now either my child is extremely talented which may be a given or the iPhone is extremely easy to use, or both. I’m partial to both with my son edging out the phone by a ways.

Now I know this may not seem as interesting to you as it was to me, but I’ve owned several phones over the years and none of them could be used as easily by my infant children at 5:30 in the morning. Maybe I’m sleep deprived or something else, but I think this would make a great selling point and commercial for Apple to use. So easy even an infant could use it!

In what is being touted as the “iPhone Killer” Verizon has released three new PDA phones.

Sources say it out-performs the iPhone in the speed of it’s wireless network, but I think that’s about all you can say. First off Verizon doesn’t seem to have the marketing power and experience that Apple does. I’ve searched the web several times trying to find information or more specifically images of the phone and all I find is little thumbnails in news articles. Verizon’s web presence is so disjointed that I’m unable to find anything on these new phones.

Alternatively when you visit Apples site you can find information about the iPhone either on the home page or a single click away. So for the so called Verizon iPhone killer, I say get in line.

I happened to check out Cameron Moll’s site and he had a link to an article that I found completely astounding. He quotes an article from Comscore. The article states that there are nearly as many web users on telephones as there are on home based computers in Japan.

The study estimated that 53.6 million people are using a mobile device to access the Internet, a figure nearly equaling the 53.7 million who accessed the Internet from either a home or a work computer in June 2007.

This along with the phenomenal amount of iPhone sales makes me really rethink the emphasis on developing sites for mobile browsers. How many people are trying to access your site with mobile browsers? Are you developing for them?

For years I’ve maintained that I hate Flash. It is aptly named and I have can’t stand it. Too many times it is just simple fluff and is never worth the model it breaks. Think about it, once you enter a site with flash and use it’s usually clunky navigation, you’re stuck. You can’t use your browsers back and forward buttons to traverse the site, you can’t bookmark a certain location within the animation. While it has it’s place for flashy animations for artistic sites, I would never use it for my navigation or for anything of importance on my site. In my book it’s just another way to break your site!

Apparently the people at Apple feel the same at least for their new iPhones. The Safari browser for iPhone does not display Flash videos. Kudos to Apple!

Here is a list of the areas to watch out for when developing for the iPhone.

• Validate your HTML and CSS
• Don’t use Flash, Look at QuickTime instead
• Watch you widths and sizes, look at using relative sizing
• Look at using new viewport meta tag
• Integrating with Google Maps is a bit different
• Automatic phone number links
• Use XHTML/HTML and CSS to keep page sizes to a minimum
• Keep number of CSS rules to a minimum.
• Use iPhone CSS to load lower resolution images
• Be conservative with JavaScript
• Create different content for desktop and iPhone browsers
• Don’t reinvent the iWheel

Read more at A List Apart Article