Walmart for iPhone beta exposes trouble for other mobile browsers?

This morning, I surfed over to Walmart.com on my iPhone looking for a dinghy anchor, of all things and was met with the new iPhone Beta version of their site. “Wow, this is great” I thought as I looked through everything including a shopping list that was just like a native app but ubiquitous. Or so I thought. With the groundswell helping iPhone sell, more and more sites are making an iPhone version. But what about other phones?

After easily finding what I needed from Walmart.com, I grabbed the Palm Pre and repeated my surfing only to be greeted by their full site. No automatic link to their optimized site for the iPhone. Yet, when I punch up the specific address for the iPhone Beta on the Pre, it works just fine as I would expect an Android phone would as well.

Without the auto-discovery to guide me to the mobile site, I’d miss the neat stuff they are brewing in the optimized sites. Is there more to it than coding in a check to assume any browser that is not Firefox, IE, or Safari is a mobile browser? I recall back in the day, I had a bunch of bookmarks on my Treo for mobile specific sites. Are we headed back to those days?

All these apps and web sites created for the iPhone are great, but we need to remember that “this too shall come to pass.” There will be an iPhone killer some day, and that successor is going to have to trick these sites to display the mobile site, kinda like how the Pre currently tricks iTunes into thinking it is an iPod so it’ll sync music. Is that a good thing?

Site: [Walmart for iPhone Beta]