In the meantime – test your site out on the iPhoney – a simulator for testing your site or web application on the iPhone.

Or check out what the iPhone will do by downloading Apple’s 20 minute guided tour. I’ve only made it through to the 5 min mark so far – but even that shows some nice features.

The rest of this post is a bit techy – so if you don’t lean towards the geeky side of the spectrum, you might want to skip to the next one…

One of the reasons I think keeping an eye on the iPhone is important is that it’s the first device I’ve seen that really handles web access well. It’s built-in wifi is part of the reason – but also some nice feature added to Safari.

But the underlying web-browser, WebKit (which is the guts of the Safari web browser) is also available on Nokia phones, and is open-source (so may popup in other browsers too.) So there is broader benefit to watching Safari and the iPhone. And, if the iPhone becomes even remotely as popular as the iPod, it will also influence what others in the market do, and will become a browser that requires support from web developers.

That last point has implications for many websites – not just ones targeted at mobile devices. Of course, standards compliant code will make the job of supporting the iPhone a lot easier. And from what I’ve seen Safari 3 implements some excellent new CSS features which will support some nice designs possible using even leaner and more semantic markup – great for designers and users alike.

As an aside – I remember Dave Hyatt, Safari’s lead developer, mentioning issues of resolution independence a while back on the Safari development blog hinting that they had some cool things coming – now we know what

Related posts:

1. Joining the iPhone dots…
2. Let the iPhone hacking begin

Like I said – not long ’till we start seeing some interesting things happening on the iPhone, perhaps even Voice over IP (VoIP).

There’s also some interesting commentary on Ajaxian about the potential for multi-touch interface support in Safari, and how AJAX (that’s a technology that reduces the number of page updates required on a page by only updating smaller parts of the page) will be a good fit on the iPhone due to high telco data charges.

Related posts:

1. Joining the iPhone dots…
2. iPhone web development

• John (Web Directions): iPhone/Safari is the Mosaic of the Mobile Web (key point: wifi and Safari in iPhone make web usable).
• Dave Winer: Why no iPhone SDK? (answer: the threat to telcos that Skype represents)

It won’t take long for someone to work out how to get Skype on the iPhone, SDK or not. And like iTunes, Apple seem to be taking a “trojan horse” approach – restricting the platform, then working to open it later.

I’m still not sure on the significance of Safari 3 more generally (iPhone fun aside) – I’ve seen very little commentary on it, which is surprising. But the combination of wifi on the iPhone is going to be a bit of a game changer methinks.

Update: interesting take – perhaps Safari is the SDK?

Related posts:

1. iPhone web development
2. Let the iPhone hacking begin