The Reality of Mobile Web Development

I'm just coming out of the other end of our mobile web project. What an interesting, and sometimes frustrating ride!

Here are some conclusions:

• jQuery Mobile is now at release candidate 2
  
• iPhone rocks on the mobile web
• Android browser is deficient
• Blackberry is seriously deficient - don't go there - it'll be stone dead in a moment!
• Windows Mobile - Late out of the gate, initial signs are good, but it's too early to tell
  

If the promise of cross-platform mobile web applications is going to be fulfilled, standards need to be conformed to, and implementation of those standards must be done well. Android should really be a contender, but they need to get their act together.
The theory of cross platform mobile web development seems sound: both iPhone and Android phones are smart devices with large memory footprints and state of the art processing power. Both have WebKit-based HTML5 compliant browsers. However in the real world they are worlds apart. You see the devil is in the details. In the final analysis, iPhone is a platform and Android is a minefield of different software and hardware configurations based on a core reference implementation. Android is not a platform, so much as a legion of platforms built out of similar materials.
It's PC vs Mac all over again in the mobile space.

As I have time, I'll go into details in other posts, including:

• This is not the Droid we were looking for!
  
• Layout strategies for iPhone & Android, Portrait & Landscape, Web App and installed App
• Delivering flexibility - versatile deployment strategies
• Optimization & caching techniques
• Integration with Facebook