As media and blog coverage of the iPhone release on Friday June 29 reaches boiling
point, web app providers are frantically pumping out versions of their apps for the
iPhone.
CRM provider Etelos – which has already embraced other popular
Web platforms like Google Apps, Netvibes, Pageflakes and Windows Live – announced on its blog today an
Etelos CRM suite of modularized CRM tools, for use on the iPhone. It already works on the
Blackberry, but Etelos’ Eric Berto says that “the browser for the iPhone is much better than
the BlackBerry”.
Another app to jump on the iPhone platform is Clippz.com, a service that lets you download “optimized
video clips” from the Internet to a mobile device (a process it calls ‘sideloading’). Clippz.com has announced it is offering more than 500 MySpace, Metacafe and YouTube collections
encoded in Apple iPhone’s H.264 file format.
It’s still early days in terms of development. Indeed we covered last night
Morfik’s new development platform for web-based iPhone apps, the first of its kind. And expect a lot more
action on this front, as Adobe AIR and Google Web Toolkit (GWT) are likely to be used to develop
iPhone apps too.
last100 editor Steve O’Hear has been exploring
the excitement around iPhone web apps. He recently spoke to web developer David Cann,
who expressed concerns about iPhone’s web app capabilities:
““We’re in a ‘wait and see’ mode at this point […] We
don’t know much about how we can interact with the browser. For example, how will
web pages interpret a user’s finger being dragged across the screen? Will they be
able to detect when a user “pinch zooms” or get access to the phone’s
local hard drive in order to upload files? The answer to these questions could seriously
hinder the possibilities of third-party iPhone applications.”
Check out
last100 for more on that interview, plus some early examples of iPhone apps.
So we are still in the ‘wait and see’ period, but there is no shortage of activity
happening amongst third party iPhone developers. There’s even an iPhone app search engine, called AddFone.com, plus the excellent iPhone Application List. What iPhone apps have you seen that have
tickled your interest and you can’t wait to use?
