Are iPhone-friendly sites actually a disservice?

David M Williams
Sunday, 14 December 2008 12:00

IT Industry - Market

Whether the iPhone is the biggest selling phone in the world or not, it's certainly become the most publicised. Businesses are clamouring to produce customised versions of their web sites which auto-detect than an iPhone is being used and render content to suit. Yet, are these actually hampering visitors?

Here are two stories of using the Safari web browser on my iPhone. Several months ago I used the Commonwealth Bank’s NetBank to move money onto my credit card before making a large purchase.

Without much effort I had achieved what I wanted, just as if I had been using my laptop with its 15” screen instead of the iPhone’s diminutive display.

Some banks have moved towards iPhone-specific sites; the Commonwealth Bank has not (at least, not at this time) and so sure enough, I had to pinch and flick and scroll and pan around.

By contrast, this week I searched for an item on eBay. Pleasantly, although I had been expecting to similarly scroll about eBay realised I was using an iPhone and delivered a smaller-screen mobile-optimised version of their auction engine.

Finding what I wanted was easy, as was opting to buy it now. However, the rub came when I tried to pay. While eBay told me I could pay right away on my iPhone using PayPal, it seems something was amiss: namely, the list of delivery addresses given for me to choose from were out of date. And there was no facility to add a new one!

I could not continue. I did not want to risk specifying the wrong postal address, even if I put in a comment “Please send to ... instead.”

I called up a new Safari window and went straight to PayPal. I was given the regular, vanilla, non-iPhone PayPal experience – which was fine; clicking on my Account and Addresses showed I had actually previously supplied PayPal with my current address.

The problem was thus my address on file with eBay. Yet, I couldn’t do the same thing with eBay. Any attempt to open up eBay on the iPhone kept resorting in the same functionality-reduced iPhone-specific site – a site which didn’t let me modify my account settings such as where I lived.

Now sure, it was my fault; I had not updated my postal address in eBay when I last moved house. Mind you, PayPal did have the right address so it is a deficiency on eBay’s part to not let me select that address.

But nevertheless, the message is that I simply could not complete my transaction while out on the road. I had to wait until I was back at a desk to do so. While the iPhone-friendly web site greatly reduced any need to scroll and zoom, it similarly reduced just what I could do.

So, the question to you is this: what is better? A Web site that fits the display of the device being used, or one which delivers a consistent experience with full functionality irrespective of the mechanism being used?