iPhone misconceptions corrected

After asking all of you what you thought of the iPhone, I found out a few people had some common misconceptions about the iPhone. Recently John Gruber addressed a few of these misconceptions, so be sure to read his article on OS X.

JavaScript
The iPhone’s version of Safari will use WebKit for rendering code, as does the Mail application on the iPhone so that you can receive “rich” emails with photos, bold text, etc. Based on that knowledge alone, it would appear that the iPhone will be able to handle JavaScript in pages just fine (though I doubt we’ll see any problems with pop-ups much like the way the current Mac OS X version of Safari blocks pop-ups nearly perfectly).

When I started to see people thinking that the iPhone would not run JavaScript, it may have gotten a lot of developers pretty scared that their sites that rely heavily on it would not perform well at all on the iPhone. This simply isn’t the case.

The iPhone also runs widgets (it remains to be seen if these widgets are twins of the Mac OS X dashboard widgets, but I bet they are fairly close). These widgets rely very heavily on Javascript, and so it would be completely insane to think that the iPhone wouldn’t be unable to parse JavaScript.

So fear not Web developer, your Web 2.0 application that you just spent hours tweaking should run fine on the iPhone. Just be sure to build in something special for those viewing your site on the iPhone like a pinch-able boob or something.

Flash
I really have nothing to base this opinion on at the moment, but I’m willing to bet that the iPhone will be able to display Flash as well. The Flash player is not all that large and seems like it could be included in the iPhone relatively easily. Although I wouldn’t bet on the performance of a incredibly Flash-intensive site on the iPhone - though Flash video sites like Viddler should work fine. Again, you’d have to ask someone who has had one of these in their hands to simply direct their browser to a Flash site.

2-megapixel camera
Thinking that the 2MP camera is not good enough simply seems ignorant to me. The iPhone is not a digital camera (nor are any of the Smart Phones in existence). Would I like it to be a higher-resolution? Not really because I’d rather my photos not take up a large amount of drive space on my phone. The most common use of the iPhone’s built-in camera will more than likely be to quickly send a photo via email to someone and/or setting someone’s photo in your phone’s address book. And for those applications I believe 2MP strikes the right balance.

GPS
Though there was no mention of GPS technology in the iPhone during the keynote I’m imagining that it will not take long before something either third-party or otherwise is available. The iPhone’s interface makes it the perfect candidate for GPS technology and I’m sure Apple is already having their phones ring off the hook of calls from various companies wanting to get their technology in their phone. If this isn’t in version 1 of the iPhone it will be in versions shortly following.

I’m sure there are other misconceptions out there. But really we all just have to wait and see what is in store for June.