We are planning on creating a mobile app for the major smartphones and we will also have a version of our site that is optimized for mobile viewing.
Are you going to/have you created both? Would love to see your apps/sites if you could share!
We had had a mobile website for quite some time. No plans for an app - it would be cool, but still seems a bit cost prohibitive. Not to hijack the thread, but I'd be interested to see any stats on usage from those who do have apps deployed.
So far we are planning to go the route of a mobile site. but I do like the idea of both for the major devices. The reason is that you can store some data on the devices. I was thinking this might be useful when doing barcodes on a device for ticket scanning. Rather than hitting the server again the ticket barcode could be saved to the device.
I created a proof of concept using JQtouch which really gives a good look and feel to mobile for IPhone/Ipods. I posted some info and a demo of what we did over here: http://www.tessituranetwork.com/COMMUNITY/forums/t/3496.aspx
I found recently a free book on windows phone 7 development over here http://www.charlespetzold.com/books.html. Another tool i was looking at is MonoTouch for developing iPhone apps using .Net code.