After getting an iPhone last week I’ve been hovering around iTunes looking at different downloads and apps.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see National Bank already have an app for simple iPhone access to your accounts. I’ve downloaded the app and as you’d expect, the first page are the login fields.

This makes sense and I’d imagine the majority of their site’s visitors would use this page as the site’s gateway. So why aren’t the login fields displayed on National Bank’s new homepage? This seems strange to me.

Anyhow, whoever they target with their homepage is their business.

The observation is that by distilling your site for the mobile market you may find some fundamental user experience issues that need changing on your main website.

A good exercise if you’ve got a whiteboard and some free thinkers.

The NZ Herald’s freshly launched mobile version will make things easier for people with iPhones to read their daily news fill. It’s great to see the mainstream media being quick to embrace this new interface.

You’ll notice the display ad and text ads framing the article. Interesting.

Trade me also launched their mobile version last month in anticipation of the iPhone 3G launch. We spoke with Trade me about featuring some tactical text link ads here but they declined as they don’t feel their audience is ready for this yet. Fair enough. I guess they make their real money through other means.

The NZHerald on the other hand do need the ad revenue to justify this new extension and obviously think their audience is ready for ads on their mobile version. Unfortunately the ad server technology isn’t. This is what happened when I clicked on the text link:

Still, we’re getting there, and someone needs to start it.