the utter death of the “mobile web”

At Rhomobile we are obviously believers that the way to interact with enterprise app data is with synced local data. Just like nobody does their email over a mobile browser, neither does anyone work with their business applications over a mobile browser: its all about local apps for either email or business apps. But at one time I thought for just reading information (browsing the New York Times, looking up topics on Wikipedia) good browsers like Safari on the iPhone were pretty good. I read news every morning on my iPhone. But a recent app puts that theory to shame. Hampton Catlin’s Wiki Mobile app, that was recently garnering over a thousand downloads a day, shows that even though read only browsing of content on smartphone browsers is pretty good, its not quite as good as a dedicated local app built for a specific site or content.