Next week, if rumors are true, the world will be tilted off its axis with the debut of Apple's much-anticipated iPhone. While I don't expect to be waiting outside an Apple Store or AT&T store with credit card in hand to partake in the imbibing of Apple's latest gadget, I will be watching the situation very closely. It's a rare thing for Apple to bring new life in this world and for me not to partake.But even prior to the iPhone's being available for commercial sale, iPhone sightings are cropping up in the wild, with the occasional spy photo or Web log tracking giving their users away. In fact, tonight, this humble site was visited by a strange creature: the iPhone.
A quick look at SiteMeter for louisgray.com shows:
ISP APPLE COMPUTER
Operating System Macintosh MacOSX
Browser Safari 2.0 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/420 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
I find the browser details fascinating. The iPhone tells Web site owners that the ISP is Apple Computer, not AT&T, that the operating system is a full fledged Mac OS X, as Steve Jobs has told us, and you even get to know the specific WebKit version underlying the Safari browser on the iPhone itself.
These days, Web authors aren't just writing for Internet Explorer and Netscape, as we were a few years ago. Now, in addition to those browsers, we need to expect our copy to hit Safari and Firefox, and a litany of new approaches to the Web, from Blackberry to generic mobile phones and now, Apple's iPhone. I expect to see iPhone browsing becoming more commonplace in the coming months. And just maybe, if I'm good, some of that will be done by me.