After 2.5 years of development, Apple seems to have an overnight hit on their hands. An amazing user interface for an all-in-one device: an ipod, phone and internet communication tool. No more strapping an iPod mini to the cell phone with a rubberband! True integration.

The main point I want to address is the internet communication device. On the iPhone will come with a modified version of Safari that’s running on modern Mac computers. So, if you have a web site right now that works fine on Safari, it should work just fine on the iPhone.

The catch is that the browser doesn’t support Flash. Well, at this moment anyway. This could change when the browser ships in June, but I’m not really sure that it will. It could be that the developers for the iPhone have pinned Flash-support as a low level priority. Or they’ve looked into Flash support and it may simply drain an already limited battery life (5 hours) even more.

One reason I believe is that the many multimedia-geared web sites like YouTube use Flash to deliver their content.

If Apple allowed people to view this content through means other than the iTunes-approved method, why on earth would people buy music and videos to then have on their iPhone? Simple. They wouldn’t. And I know I wouldn’t. I already have a stack of CDs in MP3 format. I’m just waiting to get unbusy in order to put them into a system where I can pull them on a home network accessible by just me anywhere in the world.

Lack of Flash support is just one downside in Web development for mobile devices.