Awesome! While it is still a long way away this is a first step in getting HTML5 to be a real alternative as a full replacement to native apps for mobile phones. Obviously optimizations might need to be made for HTML5 to be comparable in speed to native apps, but imagine mobile applications that are mainly write once, run on most phones.

like J2ME!

They also extended Websockets to support binary data. Given the lack of a raw binary type in Javascript, I am really interested in how this was implemented.

Maybe with this stuff? http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/#dfn-readAsBinaryStrin...

This is an interesting experiment and should hopefully encourage other people to do the same. I wonder if it will push people to think about breaking webkit out of the browser for certain uses. It would be interesting to see something like this done with WebGL for a game.

People have already thought about making regular apps with webkit and other browser components. In fact, it's a very old idea, but one that we seem to keep coming back to. I hope to see the trend continue, as I think it'll help put a stop to these nonsense platforms like AIR and Flash.

Getting access to devices client side is definitely going to power the next wave of innoviation on the web. It will essentially remove much of the destinction between a web and native app. It will also put standards based applications on a level playing field with apps using specific API's (eg iphone apps). Well in my opinion at least :)

The big question is how long will it take for most browsers to support this kind of functionality.

I would like to use it for http://www.squarechat.com I use flash right now and it just doesn't feel right. It would be great to have support for this across other browsers too.

I wrote a flash->HTML shim for webcams. Works ok on Firefox, Webkit has a memory leak. Details: http://nicklothian.com/blog/2009/12/15/using-flash-to-shim-a...

I hope the irony of including a flash video on the page, to show a video example, is not lost :)

Will this work in current browsers?

Not yet. They did mention in the comments that they would try and integrate it back into webkit.

There is also a link in the comments to a new issue for the chromium project of them adding in "device" support: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=55377

No. But they say they'll submit their code back into webkit as fast as they can. So hopefully soon!