Interestingly, there's also an interview here with the guys behind the new interface for Picasa, explaining that they went down the browser-hosted route rather than a native S60 application because it gave them more flexibility in terms of updates, i.e. they didn't have to rely on a user remembering to check for new versions and then having to download etc. For such an online tool, this does make sense, and the data would have to be downloaded anyway. The only disadvantage is the RAM overhead of having Web open all the time, but this won't be a limitation for most people.
Steve Litchfield, 3 Oct 2008