I originally asked the questions - gonna share my experience so far.
I started with PhonaGap and then switched to Trigger.io. Not necessarily saying that trigger.io is better - my main 2 reasons for switching were:
- Trigger.io compiles much faster (seconds vs minutes). When I was using phonegap, I was testing my changes using Ripple stimulator - compiling the code after every small change was simply too time consuming. Making sure that your code runs on Ripple is a headache, and when thing didn't work on the device it took forever to debug. With trigger.io I can easily test every single change on the device.
- Trigger.io allows pushing new changes to your release/app store app (instead of waiting for the users to update your app). To me it is one of the key advantages of HTML5 over native.
Some other notes:
- Trigger.io provides only mediocre customer support (I have a paid account). Not sure about phonegap
- Phonegap has much better opensource support and and way more plugins. With trigger.io if the functionality is not provided by one of their modules, or if you have a bug, you're on your own.