I’m a Windows Mobile fan (sorry ’bout that) but that doesn’t mean I’m a Windows Mobile fan-boy. I go off on mini-rants now and then and thought I would share a side-by-side comparison of what the Weather.com sites formatted for generic mobile devices (like Windows Mobile) and the version formatted for the iPhone looks like. FYI: The little rant on one of my personal site-blogs was about getting Microsoft to fix broken components like the Windows Mobile web browser. MacDevCenter readers can just look at the generic-mobile vs. iPhone formatting to appreciate what an impact the iPhone is having on web design for mobile devices.
It’s a shame they don’t dump the “generic mobile” one and give all mobile users the “iPhone version”. Mobile design isn’t a device-specific problem.
The stupid thing is that IE Mobile is more than capable of displaying something similar to the iPhone experience. Web devs are just choosing to punish us mobile web users with Windows Mobile devices :)
Well, try most sites on a Treo or Palm T|X and you Windows Mobile users won't feel so bad.
For what it's worth, there are a few sites out there that force the iPhone to suffer through the WAP experience, based on User-Agent redirection. The WAP sites want the iPhone traffic to make their hit counts look better.
Weather.com gave up the ad to show the weather on iPhone. Wow, that makes my day!
They both look like crap if you ask me. There are actually iPhone-specific weather apps (such as Wx) that have a real iPhone interface design (using interface elements that are consistent with the iPhones user interface). Both of these sites shown here look like they were designed with 1990s HTML.
I looked at both versions on the iPhone and weather.com did a good job on the iPhone version. As noted, they dumped the ad to provide more info, the directional arrows do a sidewipe to the next day's forecast, the hours below the main foecast five you the same info foe that future hour, and the map and forecast icons are well done. This is a well thought out page that has considerably more info than the WinCE version. I'm sure they could do the same thing, so my question is why the delay?