You’re either sick of hearing about the iPhone or you eat up anything said about it. I have gadgetitis, and so does Aaron, so we’ll be getting iPhones next week. If you’re a Mac user, the iPhone is a heaven sent, despite what others are saying. I’ve tried the Sidekick, Blackberry, and the Treo, all of which either didn’t sync or really had a lame attempt at syncing with my Mac. Plus, the interface for the phones has been clunky and 1990s at best.
First off, if you’re interested in iPhone visitors you may want to consider creating an application. I created my first iPhone application that so far I have called iPhone Scriptures (yes, I’m religious :)). I read from the scriptures every day and I like to have them with me when I have a spare moment to read. Since the iPhone doesn’t allow for 3rd party applications (you know, when you load those on your Treo et al then it starts crashing) except through the browser, I figured I had better just build my own. I found a database of the scriptures and made a quick and simple AJAX interface. It’s not perfect, but it will improve over time (and especially after I get my iPhone!). You can see what it might look like on an iPhone simulation.
iPhone Visitors in Google Analytics
From initial Google Analytics data from my iPhone app, it looks like the only way to distinguish the iPhone from other Macs is through the screen resolution, which is 320 x 396. You would think there would be some further distinguishing, but not so far. I looked at the browsers, OS, hostnames, and network locations but could not distinguish the group of iPhone visitors through any of those.
So to check for iPhone visitors, open up Google Analytics, go to Visitors, then to Browser Capabilities, then to Screen Resolution. Look for 320 x 396. You may be asking (if you are a crazy iPhone maniac like me) why not 320 x 480? The viewable area of the browser goes down to 396 in height with the address bar area, etc.
Google Analytics is always a bit delayed, so I haven’t seen a bunch of traffic yet. Plus, I’m sure reading the New Testament on your new iPhone probably isn’t on the top of most people’s lists for discovering its cool features. For anyone with a new iPhone, I found this cool application (well designed, much better than mine) that works as a home page for accessing all the different iPhone apps.
