If you haven’t made a pilgrimage to an Apple store to see a real life iPhone, you should. First, let me apologize for harping on about the iPhone, but I really believe this is a watershed moment, for the reasons I’ve blogged: ‘its software wrapped up in cool hardware’. It’s a compelling device and my only issue is the amount of storage, although it appears others have an issue with the battery replacement program. 8 Gigs ain’t gonna do it for me. I’m already at 35 on my iPod and that’s before I’ve even started ripping my vinyl collection with one of those USB decks that I haven’t even bought yet.
Anyway, the iPhone. I took my two girls on the pilgrimage. We were there for an hour just playing – did I mention it’s a compelling device? The best thing about it was the phone – it worked. I called my wife just to tell her I was calling from an iPhone. I left voicemails for some people at work, I called myself just so it would register the phone number and I could call that iPhone back at some later date – no, I haven’t yet… I surfed the Getty’s website just so we’d get some iPhone signatures on our webmetrics reports. I know, I’m sad.
If you’ve been reading Holly’s blog, you’ll know she and I did a gig for the army museums at Fort Bragg. The conference theme was “Hidden Treasures: Marketing Your Collections to Meet the Mission, Challenges, and Opportunities in the 21st Century”. I concentrated on the challenges, in particular I talked about ‘Digital Natives’ – essentially kids, but now grown ups for whom technology and the digital world is the norm. I talked about the iPhone as an example of how ‘equipped’ the army museum’s audience will be in the 21st century.
In large part my iPhone ‘pitch’ didn’t connect with them, which is curious because the military are at the forefront of virtual world training: aptitude in war gaming and flight simulation gets you in. The recruiting military ‘get it’ about how technology is affecting the battlefield. They need youth whose hand-eye coordination is exemplary, they need youth who can engage with the virtual world. My girls who are currently engaged with Club Penguin are unwittingly preparing themselves for a shoe-in with the military.
After my presentation the disconnect was obvious, army museums are focused on the physical, while the ‘army of one’ is focused on the virtual.
Anyway, the iPhone. Go and surf the web on one. I frequently surf the web on my Treo and its okay, it does the job but it often does some spatial remapping depending on how complex the page layout is to reorganize the content for the small screen. The iPhone’s Safari does no remapping, looks like I might be wrong about requiring multiple versions of your site for effective display on different platforms. On the one hand its good news that we might not have to generate multiple versions when the numbers show that just as many people are surfing our websites on tiny screens, on the other its bad news that we won’t have to think seriously about how we architect our data to make it pristine for multi-platform delivery.
