Apple likes to claim that the iPhone puts the whole Internet in your hand:

And, for the most part, it’s true. The question I’m considering here is: is that good?

There is so much screen space on a desktop or laptop that web pages are bigger, wider, and filled with graphical ads. When you try to shrink this down onto iPhone size, well… take this screenshot of the Washington Post:

The headlines are barely readable! Once you make them out, you can click on an article, and it’ll load it up. The whole page, including ads:

You can zoom in with a double-tap, at least, which makes the text bigger and more readable, thank goodness:

But there’s a lot of squinting and careful tapping to make sure you zoom in and not accidentally tap a link. Kind of a pain. OK, a real pain.

A lot of sites are still offering mobile versions – or, even worse, creating an iPhone-specific version that mirrors the main site. It’s not the whole Internet, but it’s way more usable. Here’s the mobile Washington Post site:

And then, when you click on an article? One-column, reasonably sized fonts, easy to read and scroll:

In my opinion, the mobile iPhone-specific Internet is far more usable than the Whole Internet that the iPhone gives you. It is good that the iPhone can render almost any page you navigate to, and it’ll be somewhat usable. But when the best usability experiences come from a limited version of a website designed specifically for your device, there’s a problem.

The solution, I would think, would be a larger screen. That would give the device more pixels to work with so text on web pages wouldn’t have to be so imperceptible. Of course, this makes the device bigger, less pocketable, and far less desirable. There are solutions, though: mini-projectors are here, folding and scrolling displays are not quite, and other technologies someone must be working on. Until then, we may be stuck with users hoping their favorite sites also develop limited versions of themselves, just for the iPhone.