Hmm, having not had internet access at home this week (moving house), I can safely say that smartphone browsing is no substitute for the real thing.
It is fine for emergency use or looking up telephone numbers or key information on the move, but it isn't a good experience.
That said, if people are get used to using a different browser to IE on their smartphone, they could switch on the desktop.
Fennec is a turd, currently. I've tried the nightly builds since the middle of last summer and it seems that the Mozilla team really didn't get smartphone programming, back then. It wouldn't load - it was breaking the memory limits set by Windows Mobile. Instead of working out how to write the code more compactly (like Opera and Microsoft have done on that platform), they whined about how poor the memory limitations were and wanted Microsoft to change the limits on how much memory a program could allocate!
This is wrong on a desktop platform. Yes, we have more memory and more processing power these days, but it doesn't mean programmers should become lazy when coding - something I've seen time and time again over the years. The worst was working for an online ad agency, which also ran e-shops for customers. The coders had no grounding in programming efficiency - these code was elegant and it worked, but it wasn't efficient.
Changing the queries to work more efficiently and working through the PHP and changing IF/THEN, WHILE, REPEAT etc. loops with optimised versions meant the servers went from collapsing with 50 shoppers buying at the same time, to not really showing much load with 250 shoppers. Before the optimisation, during PayPal newsletter days or major sales, the sysadmin was bouncing MySQL every minute or so, when it collapsed under the weight of requests and slow queries. When I left, they just had to run the monitors in the background, to keep an eye on bandwidth usage...
Just changing the way the JOINs were made and optimising key performance brought queries down from 40 seconds each to under 0.5 seconds! And that was a frequently used query!
Optimisation of code seems to be something which is no longer important, when designing and building computer systems. Fennec seems to be a classical example of this, in the mobile arena. And instead of learning how to better optimise their code for the system constraints (limited memory and processing power), they want Microsoft to remove the limits (which are there for a good reason), so they can carry on programming in the way they are used to.
The current version at least loads up (previous versions would blow memory limits, before the splash screen was displayed!).
Any app that duplicates existing functionality on the iPhone won't make it into the App store.
