Appletell | Apple, Mac, iPhone, iPod | News, Rumors, Reviews, How-Tos

Taking the old route, Walmart has decided to create an iPhone-ready website for their company instead of an actual iPhone app such as Amazon and Target have. With a nice interface and the ability to browse through Walmarts entire catalog in a site created specifically for the iPhone, it can be a great help. You are also able to fill your cart—which Walmart is calling a “Shopping Cart”—through the site, which can be useful. On top of that, you can also search the $4 prescriptions that the company offers. Although this news in and of itself isn’t very exciting, it does show another company following along a trend that I am seeing to be more relevant each and every day.

Before the iPhone, companies would usually simply create a mobile version of their website that didn’t look good at all on most of the mobile web browsers that were available at the time. Although this did show that companies cared about the mobile market, those sites probably weren’t all that popular because they were usually hard to navigate via the phone’s interfaces. What’s interesting about this is how the iPhone has changed this outlook. Although the iPhone has the ability to show the normal desktop versions of the websites, we still see companies creating iPhone specific sites. For lack of a better word, it is sort of weird.

On one hand, it is nice to have an iPhone specific version because it is usually easier to navigate and offers faster loads times. On the other hand, it could be considered pointless by some. Wasn’t the whole point of having the full web on your phone so that we developers wouldn’t have to alter code for the iPhone? It seems sort of strange that developers would embrace the iPhone be creating yet another site beside their desktop and mobile version. What are your thoughts on this?

Via [The Unofficial Apple Weblog]