So, why use Cordova/PhoneGap? In all honesty, it lured me with its promises of cross-platform, write-once-deploy-anywhere capabilities.
The basic concept with PhoneGap is that it provides a container for an HTML5/JavaScript application to run in. All native calls to the device are abstracted by the PhoneGap API, which you call directly using JavaScript. The idea is that your application calls them same API in the same way no matter what device it’s running on, which entails PhoneGap presenting a consistent API to your application and taking care of the lower level calls to the device. You would essentially make the same call to, say, take a picture, and PhoneGap would deal with the specifics of how that’s implemented on the device it’s running.
Another reason it was appealing to me was the fact that my code would be in HTML5 and JavaScript. No platform native code!
As you can see, that reason alone is very compelling. I don’t have enough experience yet in this brave new world to really say whether PhoneGap delivers, but I sure as hell hope so.
Travels through the Gap 