Mobile SmartPhone Application Development

We have recently added 4 SmartPhone compatible pages to Art & Technology.
This involved adding a php file to some of our pages to see if it was a small screened mobile device, then use a simpler formatted webpage for display.  Only the main index, cartoons, about and contact have been revised at this point in time.

Seems to work Ok, but I only have a Samsung Android Phone and haven't checked it on all platforms.  And there are a lot of platforms.  Did find one issue on the iPhone that has now been fixed, but had to borrow one to do it.   We basically use very simple formatting and a screen width of 320px.  Saves all that pinching and zooming on a phone.

Now,  90% website accesses are from large screen devices, such as PCs, Macs and iPads.  People may find something on the phone, but use a REAL screen to actually read or see it.

Apps are all over the media. A new gold rush. I cannot see the advantage of using the Facebook or Twitter app over the mobile webpage.  SmartPhones are also tedious to enter info into  and a status update is something I don't want to do from a phone.

So we keep asking ourselves, what app is appropriate to implement for Art & Technology that has value?

We have looked at the Android SDK and built some of the samples. It is a Java platform, and not really suitable for real-time things.
Many years ago we were prototyped in Smalltalk/V the AI Musicbook.  This was a midi phrase based portable music composition/arranging system that GarageBand looks like now. Roland developed the PMA-5 from the concept.  This combined with some idea generation tools (1/f noise constrained to scales) is still an interest.....  With our own set up, it would be more useful to have in Reaper  rather than on our phone.

I'm not the only one asking these questions. Eric Sink - Mobile Apps: HTML5 vs Native", has too .

It is about the quality of the network connection, and what you want to achieve. If the network was good and fast all the time, then you don't need native applications.