The iPhone sites keep coming, now includes BofA
The march of the iPhone specific sites keeps on coming, and now includes a specially formatted view of the BofA site just for the iPhone. Just point your iPhone to www.bofa.mobi for a look. While it’s not the worlds greatest iPhone specific site, it does look and work better than the normal BofA site as viewed thru the iPhone browser. Probably the benchmark for great jobs with an iPhone specific site goes to folks at Facebook.
Oh wait, you don’t have an iPhone? Well, you can still visit the site in a regular browser like IE or FF, but you won’t actually see the real iPhone version. That’s because the site looks at the “user agent” of your browser, and tries to present the best looking view for your browser (like blackberry, iPhone, etc).
If you are using FireFox, it is pretty easy to trick the www.bofa.mobi site into THINKING you are coming from an iPhone.
Just use the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox, and set the user agent string (yes, its a long string):
- Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
I certainly expect to see more and more sites out there create iPhone specific formats for their content (even if for no other reason, it makes a great demo to potential customers and users). But more than that, for the iPhone public, these sites are genuinely useful. The iPhone pretty darned good screen resolution makes it possible to create something not completely crappy, which unfortunately is what many mobile sites look like today. A popular place to see the current list is iphoneapplicationlist.com (not an apple site).
