Check this out… I was looking at the iPhone 20min Guided Tour on Apple.com and is it just me or is the browser on the iPhone just a Google Maps type image viewer application and not a full fledged browser? Look at the screen midway through the guide (about 10min). Here are a few suspicious things about the iPhone web browser:

– iPhone web pages load too fast for Edge (could be that it’s just for the demo) — but could if they follow the Google Maps model.
– when the user “zooms in”, it looks like the image is getting blurry, exactly like it does with Google Maps, then the higher resolution images load in.
– when the user moves around, the same happens.
– when the user “zooms out” (pictured), the image panels to the left are not loaded. Exactly how Google Maps works.

I’m speculating here and could be 100% wrong, but I think Apple might be proxying all requests to a server (3rd Party??) that takes a snap shot of the page, much like “snap.com“, except it updates more often.

Guess we’ll know for sure in a few days! What do you guys think?

Update: So I talked to Mike D. (he’s a diehard fanboy of Apple) and I’m more than likely wrong… why it’s loading fast is because it’s wi-fi — look at the wifi signal indicator next to AT&T? And we think it’s rendering the page first on screen, then turning it into an img (PDF) and then re-rendering it to screen when zoomed — like the PDF viewer — wow! The iPhone must have a ton of processing power!? Guess, there won’t be any magic that will make the pages load quicker over Edge.