One of the things I’ve been sorely missing since I switched from my old Sidekick II to my iPhone is the ability to hop on IRC and kill some time. On the Sidekick, I took advantage of the downloadable shell client and a remote server with a command-line IRC client installed, but on the iPhone, no such luck.

I was expecting to have to wait until June of this year when Apple starts allowing third-party applications on the device, but out the woodwork has come Mibbit, an iPhone compatible AJAX web application which provides the full IRC experience– arguably better even than that which I had with my Sidekick. Mibbit even manages to provide pre-join scrollback to help users catch up on conversation they may have missed– something I’d like to see in my desktop client as well.

While there are certainly some flaws with the Mibbit+iPhone union– its hard to type and read chat at the same time– it’s certainly a site I’ll be adding to my home screen.