Here at SitePen, we’ve got some pretty deep experience with building apps for mobile devices and having seen the issues first-hand, I firmly believe that Apple is doing a great thing (in the medium term) for the world by making the Open Web the way to deliver apps to their phone. In the short term, they’ll be doing millions of people a huge favor by letting them replace their Treos with a device that doesn’t reboot when exposed to air, sunlight, or text messages.

There are interaction problems yet to be solved (how do you “thingify” a web app for the iPhone? offline? etc.), but fundamentally the iPhone puts the onus on the browser to mediate hardware access better. This is the right race to be running since it forces every one else to one-up Apple on openness and immediately cuts out the idiotic middle man situations that Brew and even J2ME create through oligopoly and ineptitude, respectively.

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Google has posted many of the talks from Google Devloper Day 2007 on YouTube. Gummi Hafsteinsson, a Google Mobile Applications Product Manager, gave an excellent overview on building for the mobile web. Key points in the presentation include:

• Keep it simple–get your site working on a single basic device first
• Focus on features your users will need while they are away from their desk
• Resize images so they are just big enough for the device to save the users time and money
• Be careful of simulators. Many apps will work on the simulator but look bad or crash the real phone
• Entry level phones are a large chunk of the market but are very limited and your app may crash them

So how does Google stack up against their own criteria for building better mobile web sites? Let’s take a look at mobile gmail.
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