Broken Frontier

Let's keep some perspective here. The iPhone will be released to the American market on June 29. 100 million Americans will not own one by June 30. 100% of that 100 million will not be using it to browse the Web. 100% of those iPhone browsers will not be looking for comics.

In fact, Steve Jobs himself has set a goal of only 10 million iPhone sales worldwide for 2008... a 1% share of the mobile phone market, as opposed to Apple's current 63%-and-climbing share of the music player market. That's still ambitious compared to the sales of other "smart phones," but it won't change the face of the marketplace significantly before 2009.

That said, usage has a way of creeping up without our realizing it. Mobile developers have been trying for years to turn phones into the next Web platform, and Jobs might just have done it. The enterprising cartoonist who plans for iPhone browsing now might be in a position to reap benefits two years out.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the iPhone, or "the iPod Phone" as we carefully called it then, back when I was involved with Clickwheel. What would it mean for cartoonists? In the end we weren't sure, because we expected there to be problems which Apple has solved.

The mobile content marketplace has a history of performing below expectations, a history that I think will continue as long as the default is to charge for something that users can't sample. In this day and age, the default price for digital entertainment is free. Why pay for the cow when you can download the milk off the Web? Sometimes you can get people to pay for premium milk, but only if they've already developed a taste for it. iTunes, for instance, offers a tantalizing taste of the songs in its archive, and most of its customers are buying music they've already heard someplace else.

Smaller mobile content developers can't offer the kind of extravagant giveaways that Web developers can, because the entrance fee to the market is much higher.

The iPhone, however, has skipped past the traditional moco development industry, focusing instead on Web-based applications and a modified version of the Safari browser. That's great news for digital cartoonists who don't want to have to learn a new platform. And it eliminates that cost to entry. Which means that you-- yes, you-- can be an iPhone content developer.

Why would you want to be? I wrote earlier that the iPod combined three virtues: portability, durability and ubiquity. The iPhone has the first two of these and is working its way up to the third.

Portability: Unlike a computer or even a laptop, you can carry an iPhone just about anywhere.

Durability: You can save gigabytes' worth of comics on it.

Ubiquity...? Well, the iPhone isn't anywhere as I write this, and the rollout speed means it won't be truly ubiquitous for a while. But you could do worse than to bet on its growth. The stock market certainly does.

How hard would it be to rework some of your strips for the iPhone?

First of all, if you didn't want to reduce your images to everyone else, you'd need a redirect to intercept mobile users, something like a modified version this one in PHP or of this one for ASP.

Unlike the messy Web we know, the iPhone's browser represents a fixed screen resolution. No swapping between 800x600, 1280x1024, 1280x800 or whatever... the screen window is either 320x480 or 480x320, depending on which way you're holding it. The vertical browser window within the screen window is given as 320x396 (almost 4:5).

Designing images to fit within that window, if you're used to the Web, is challenging, but not impossible, and it's sure easier than the resolutions of previous iPods (220x176 for iPod Photo, 320x240 for iPod Video). Gisele Lagace and I are developing sample iPhone-friendly strips for Penny and Aggie. If our tracking software tells us that those strips have started to generate traffic, we'll do more.

Jason Fried, CEO of the influential software firm 37signals, is also rising to the challenge. "It's like going back to the early days of the Web, when people's connections were a lot slower. The EDGE network and mobile phone latency [increase] the need to keep page size down, images sparse, etc. It's a return to the power of text, shape, color, and basic HTML. I love it."

Nothing could live up to the hype that's led some snarky analysts to dub the iPhone "the Jesusphone." But the iPhone's leap over the quagmires that hamper today's mobile content industry could make a profound difference for every content provider, especially the small content provider. I doubt that difference will translate into user traffic numbers before 2009 or 2010, but I can wait. I'd give my whole comic-book collection to go back to "the early days of the Web" and make an investment in that medium then.

We may as well invest a little time and effort into this one, now.

What do we have to lose?