travelin_cat - 7:17 pm on Jun 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices.

This makes sense. The icon for the iPhone/Touch is 57x57 and they want to keep it uniform. We have created icons for our sites because they look better then the screen capture that is the default on the iPhone.

All it takes is adding a file called apple-touch-icon.png to get a very nice clean looking icon. Google obviously sees icons for hand helds as the future and wants to keep consistency.