iPhone Market Share; doing my part

Interesting report (via Fake Steve Jobs, of course) that the iPhone has a higher market share (as measured through browser usage) than Windows Mobile. Of course there are lots of caveats with such a study, such as whether browser usage is the right metric to measure smartphone penetration (hint: how often do you browse the web on your phone?). But it’s still broadly suggestive of one thing: Apple got the mobile browser experience right.

And starting tonight, I will be doing my part to grow that market share. I picked up my iPhone this morning and will be activating it tonight (when I get to my home computer). It’s very cool, even turned off sideways smiley.

URL enabled Leopard Mail

Apparently, as of Mac OS X 10.5, Apple’s Mail client provides a new URL protocol: message:. Good article at Daring Fireball that explains the message: protocol and how to get the information from it. What use is it? Well, any third party app that wants to index and point into the mail store can simply use a URL, which really opens up the types of development environments you can write those things in and the portability of the data.

Bottom line: the format is message:%3cmessage-id%3e, where %3c and %3e are the encoded values of < and > respectively, and the message-id is gotten from the Message-ID header and can be viewed by dragging the mail message to TextPad or another drag-compatible client, or by using AppleScript.

Cool stuff.