The browser is the killer app

For those of you not in the Valley this video clip of a recent Mobile Wars Roundtable will offer up some real insight into the prevailing histeria created by the iPhone.

This is a two hour video but it is worth a watch if you are in the mobile industry.

45 minutes of the discussion at the beginning is on nothing but phone applications - it takes an interjection from our CEO Judy to wake the room up to the fact that you can do a hell of a lot on the phone using just the browser. As Eric Schonfeld - the mediator from TechCrunch - puts it "the browser is the killer app".

Discussion still returns to "apps" and this even after the room of developers confirms that no-one is developing only for the iPhone and nothing else.

It is a really interesting insight into a different way of thinking and a peculiar one from a predominantly web based audience. Where does this fixation for apps come from? It certainly isn't a web thing.

The fact that you can browse the internet from your iPhone (albeit better with Mippin - see the Pepsi Challenge) will be one of the iPhone's great contributions to the mobile industry. But if app development is to be another there could be trouble, and a lot of wasted money, ahead.