One of the more curious aspects of this device was that it did what Apple does best… it stripped something and replaced it in favour of something else. While in the past Apple would strip out the floppy disk drive in favour of a CD drive, and these days the DVD drive in favour of the web, in this case they stripped out native applications in favour of web-based apps.

It didn’t last long. The developer community was unhappy that they couldn’t get direct hardware access, invented the term “jailbreaking” and launched Cydia – your iPhone hackers app portal. For Apple this meant the web to take a backseat while things got sorted out, and in rolled an official SDK and an App Store in 2008.

Here we are 3 years later, and what has happened? Well, we’ve got iPads now, and the rise of the “web app.” But not quite where it should be. Thanks to Internet Explorer 6 (and other reasons), the internet is 10 years behind. HTML 4 was released in 1998, and it took a separate working group to develop the next iteration, HTML 5. It’s almost ready, almost. But HTML 5 doesn’t just need the semantic markup, it needs the APIs to access hardware, and for the first time in a wee while, we’re seeing rapid development in this area.

Thanks to the likes of Google, Mozilla and even Apple, we’re seeing some fantastic work being done. You can now access the GPS and the accelerometer. You can have up to eleven fingers of touch input (on iPad and iPhone, and Android 3.x). You can have hardware rendered special effects that run silky smooth. Soon, Android browsers will have access to the camera via HTML 5′s Device APIs. Chrome now enables C/C++ applications. The web standards today are being just as dynamic as the web it’s trying to deliver.

The web isn’t suited to everything, and that’s the case even on the desktop. On the desktop the native application is solving what I’d consider niche problems now. When was the last time you saw someone running a native mail client? The only people who would are running Outlook where email and communication demands are not the same as your general consumer. Games and music players are other examples, however music is already floating up in the cloud thanks to Last.fm and Grooveshark.

Native apps on mobile are sure to do the same… eventually the web will win out and native apps will solve niche problems that the web can’t solve (but may take a couple of years to get there). The current wave of native apps are pretty much a stop-gap. The argument that people expect a native experience all the time is a farce, people are more accepting of differences and quirks more than some realise. Look at the iPhone app landscape – everyone is banging on about “native! native! native!” and then rave about TapBots TweetBot which looks like no other iPhone app on the store.

Is the demand for native apps for websites coming about because websites aren’t creating adequate mobile web experiences? If you look at Facebook, it doesn’t function quite right on the iPad, so demand for an iPad app grows (and is to be announced?). Something that can be solved by Facebook easier if they accept that using Facebook on an iPad sucks. Utilising touch in your website isn’t hard, if you have a photo scroller, use something like jQuery.swipe to add left/right scrolling when someone swipes their finger.

I saw one of my friends’ friends had an iPhone and asked her how she found it, considering she wasn’t the most computer literate person and didn’t work around technologists. She described it as “awesome” and that email on it was “amazing.” Looking at her homescreen however, she was using Gmail. Yup, the mobile version of Gmail’s website. It was adequate for her.

The only factor not in favour of using the mobile web is Apple’s curious decisions with its HTML 5 “App Platform.” Keeping homescreen apps one-step-away from normal Safari, not having any way to upload files (even just photos), and limiting WebGL to their ad platform. Still, it does have the better HTML 5 device support, it’s just the web app developers need to talk louder.