iPhone News Updated

Posted by Ryan Stewart

This week I wrote a letter to the desktop welcoming it back. Then I got an email from one of my long time commentors asking if the iPhone counted as a “desktop”. Sure it’s not a desktop in the traditional sense, but in the application sense, it might be. This article about Microsoft looking at ways to create iPhone applications seems to help support that thought.

The iPhone is unlike any other mobile device partly because the general experience, both user and developer, is so similar to a desktop. We’ve already seen a lot of Ajax-RIAs created specifically for the iPhone. It has rich media capabilities, and while I haven’t spent much time with the SDK, I assume application developers can take advantage of some of those.

So the iPhone has some native, desktop-like traits. Should it be included in the desktop conversation? What do you think? Are iPhone applications going to be counted as RIAs?