More iPhone limitations

Published 6/27/07

I was surprised to find that the iPhone is a lot more limited than I expected. And I’m not talking about lack of wireless broadband support, either.

It turns out that, despite Apple’s claim that “This is not a watered down version of the iphone2a Internet” on the iPhone, it is a watered-down version. I don’t even need to get overly technical.

The iPhone doesn’t support Flash. Its support for JavaScript is limited to five seconds. It doesn’t handle frames well.

Bottom line: A lot of Web sites won’t display properly, or even well, on the iPhone.

Apple gave its developers a list of the iPhone’s Web limitations. Some make perfect sense — a 10 MB limit on Web pages. But others seem to indicate a watered down Web.

Per Pocket Picks:

A few iPhone size limitations / restrictions are noted in developing for the iPhone:
- 10MB max html size for web page
- Javascript limited to 5 seconds run time
- Javascript allocations limited to 10MB
- 8 documents maximum loaded on the iPhone due to page view limitations
- Quicktime used for audio and video

The notes confirm that there is no Flash and no Java support, and Apple recommends the following design considerations:
- separate html and css
- use well structured and valid html
- size images appropriately dont rely on browser scaling
- tile small images in backgrounds, dont use large backgroung images
- iPhone supports both EDGE and WiFi. EDGE pipe is smaller than WIFI pipe so think about bandwidth when developing.
- XHTML mobile documents supported
- stylesheet device width:480px
- apply different css for the iPhone. For example displaying a one column page for iphone vs a 3 column page on a desktop.
- there are no scroll bars or resize knobs. the iphone will automatically expand the content
- Avoid framesets, scrollable frames are automatically expanded to fit the content
- iPhone User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3
- Video: H.264 baseline profile level 3.0 up to 640 x 480

This isn’t to take away from the iPhone’s glorious interface. But it’s still a first-rate interface on a second-rate smartphone.

The Fray

3 responses (add yours)

Steve says:

I wonder if there were legal or processor issues with Flash/Java.

It’s not a surprise, though: the first-gen iPods were rubbish, too. It takes a few generations of these kinds of devices for them to really get the bugs out.

I do expect phones to kick some butt in a few years, though.

June 27th, 2007 at 6:54 PM

Andrew says:

Actually, I think the iPhone is a slick piece of work, and I bet I’d enjoy using one for the phone and photo things. But I’d be really annoyed about not being able to download music, and I would want a real Web browser.

I think you’re right — I think gen 2 will be something very cool. But the hype over gen 1 is crazy-making.

June 27th, 2007 at 7:15 PM