You’re certainly right about how inadequate most smartphones and cells are at rendering a web experience. Nielen actually groups them into three types, requiring three different web versions if you wanted to optimize for each.

You’re also right that everyone is jumping on the app bandwagon. Just yesterday Yahoo announced their mobile portal.

I’m just now sure that an app for every mobile task is the right solution, of a web interface will do the trick. It reminds me of the days when people thought the solution to lackluster desktop web experiences was developing in Flash. These complete Flash sites were attractive, but got in the way of people concerned with accessibility, plug-in independence and uniformity in GUI.

It’s interesting to note that while the iPhone application industry is booming, so is the work of web interface developers to make iPhone Safari versions of web pages. Perhaps we’ll see things shake out the way the desktop web did, with a place for downloadable applications (such as my belowed Air app for interacting with Twitter, Twhirl) and smart web browser experiences.

I got here via your Facebook post. I have to say, I think “the mobile web” as it stands now and as it is thought of based on the last decade or so is slightly overrated. Not in its future, but in its past.

Here’s what I mean. There are two reasons:

(1) The Mobile Web depends on the device itself, of which most pre-2007 were pathetic. As we begin to get better and better devices, the mobile web will change considerably, and thus creating a version of your site to fit the present mobile web will change. Take the Safari browser on the iPhone for example. Although I am not arguing against having a mobile version of a site, I do think that creating one for the past mobile web is a mistake.

(2) Apps. As we’ve seen already in Quarter 1 of 2009, every mobile carrier and manufacturer is trying to be like Apple. We have all four spectrums of the mobile market (carriers, manufacturers, app creators, and 3rd party platforms) trying to create their own app store. From Verizon to Nokia to Google to Digital Media Interactive, you can now buy apps for your mobile device out there.

What does this mean? Well, so many of the experiences we’d get trying to find the weather or a movie time on a mobile website will be supplanted by a much more useful and better designed application on the device. I know I don’t use Safari hardly ever on my iPhone — I strictly use apps.

Couple the personal use of apps with the eventual professional (Salesforce apps on both iPhone and Blackberry for example), and any sort of external communication on future mobile devices I believe will be done through apps. (At least 90-95% would be my guess).