Hello all,
Sorry, this place is becoming my goto place for benign questions, being a lowly lone developer has its drawbacks!
You are looking for some information via Google on your iPhone/iPod touch. You find a link to a website that has all you need. Two options:
1) The website is optimised for the iPhone and looks nice enough but is fairly dumb i.e. no location awareness, access to contacts etc.
2) The website says, hey we have an iPhone app, you need to install it to see this lovely information. The app is free and fairly small (< 2 MB).
Would option 2 put you off enough to go elsewhere? It's not intended as a walled garden, it's a choice between me developing an iPhone app AND an iPhone web app and have them co-exist, or go with just one option.
Obviously having just one is easier for me but I want to keep as many people happy as I can because I'm that kind of guy.
Thanks!
Making an iPhone-friendly website isn't very hard, and using the iUI will allow you to easily integrate a psuedo-iPhone interface.
Then, your iPhone application would pull in your iPhone website, while also providing the other functionality you want to include (location awareness, contacts).