Sorry Safari
Now that the iPhone SDK has been released and third-party apps are on the way, nobody is claiming that web apps are the future of phone software. I had an experience the other night that gives a good argument against them.
I was writing a blog entry in my hotel room, which means I was typing into Tumblr’s site using Safari on my iPhone. Now, I don’t know the intracacies of the iPhone’s memory management, but I do know that Safari will only keep a page cached until something else needs the memory. I was a few sentences into my post when my phone rang. My wife was calling so the kids could tell me goodnight. As soon as I was done with the call, I switched back to Safari. Safari started reloading the page, which no longer contained the beginnings of my post.