I guess you never tried any of the mobile variants of Opera browser, or Firefox for mobile devices, those are just as capable as Safari.
I have, and I think out of appreciation of what great browsers like Opera have done in raising the bar for the mobile web, you've allowed yourself to be grossly out of touch with the phrase "just as capable".
When you tap a menu in Opera, can you use your thumb to roll through the options like a slot machine? Can you double-tap on an HTML element, whether it be an image or a DIV tag, and have it automatically zoom in? Is their environment so fluid and rich, that people have begun building web apps like BeeJive or SeeqPod that take advantage of the flexibility and performance of its Ajax and multimedia capabilities?
I'm sorry, even going to the Opera website and looking at their demos, anyone can see a night and day user-experience difference. It doesn't take anything away from Opera to say this either. Safari has a much much better platform to run on. If Firefox and Opera ran on iPhone's mobile OS X, I have every confidence that these versions would blow away their Windows Mobile and Simbian counterparts too, but it would take much more development than where they're at now.
Agreed?
When I said,
"few web browsers on EV-DO are anywhere near as capable or easy to navigate as Safari", I really meant it. Not for EV-DO's limitations or the incompetance of browser makers, but due to poor phone platforms. Unfortunately. I was looking at a demo of the Helio Ocean web browsing on YouTube, recently, and it was paaaaaainful looking.
~ CB