Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, after months of rumors and speculation. Retroactively labeled, the "original" iPhone was introduced in the United States on June 29, 2007 before being marketed in Europe.
The iPhone 3G was announced on June 9, 2008, and relased July 11. It supported faster 3G data speeds and included assisted GPS.
The iPhone 3GS has improved performance by supporting 7.2 Mbps HSDPA downloading. It was released in the U.S., Canada and six European countries on June 19, 2009, in Australia and Japan on June 26, and internationally in July and August 2009.
On June 7, 2010 the iPhone 4 was introduced at WWDC by Steve Jobs, and will begin shipping on June 24, 2010.
There are more than 100,000 iPhones in Ireland, not to mention iPods and iPads, and this number is growing.
iPhone users can, and do, access the Internet frequently, and in a variety of places. According to Google, the iPhone generates 50 times more search requests than any other mobile handset. According to Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann, "The average Internet usage for an iPhone customer is more than 100 megabytes. This is 30 times the use for our average contract-based consumer customers." Nielsen found that 98 percent of iPhone users use data services, and 88 percent use the internet.
Most websites will be compatible and work fine on iPhone and Blackberry. However, it's still possible to make the web sites more supportive and user-friendly by giving more information to the handset about how the webpage should be displayed on the browser.
Usually smartphones don't support Flash and Java so these elements cannot be used on a mobile site.
Another reason is that standard websites are optimized for pointing devices (like a mouse). On a touch-based website, there's no mouse-over functions. People are touching the screen and with that touch the site should slide up and down or load another page.
