Neil McAllister argues that Software Developer Kits [SDK] are not the be all and end all of smart devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and Android. The Microsoft side of this style of argument is the boorish, "Developers, developers, developers" and that you do not have a viable platform unless developers have bought into your SDK. But as McAllister notes both the iPhone and Android come with WebKit - an HTML rendering engine based upon Konquerer's kHTML engine. The universal device in the smart phones is the web browser.
That means Web applications designed for one will render almost identically on the other, provided their developers adhere to published standards. Those same applications will also render on WebKit-based desktop browsers, such as Safari and Google Chrome, and on any other browsers that implement the standards correctly. Based on that, all this talk of SDKs seems almost foolish.The iPhone applications store opened to massive fanfare but I have only downloaded one application. That is the remote so I can operate my iTunes library remotely through my phone. I use the browser on the iPhone every day and I am extremely thankful that it renders web pages without any loss of the original formatting. Many, many years ago I did a smart device project to collect facility data. We tried an iPag which at the time was Compaq's smart device. It came with a windows operating system of some kind, I cannot recall which. It didn't work and wasnt popular. We then tried phones and the horrendous WAP toolkits. Then we tried blackberries. The main benefit of the Blackberry was the RIM browser (as opposed to the WAP AT&T; browser which was crap). It would render a page honestly even though it was on a small screen. I made up a version of the website so that it could be used on the Blackberry but most technicians used the main website which was intended for desktops and laptop style resolutions anyway. The browser that could render the web on a mobile device became the solution. In my opinion McAllister is right. The web is going to continue being the web and SDK's are anachronisms to get people to that level of universal browsing.
