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Hi All,

We are currently looking to attract Beta phase participants who would be interested in trying out our new service which we have just launched. (its free to use and there will also be a free version after the official launch.)

The first step is to browse your way over to: http://www.handsetdetection.com/

We believe that this will represent one of the first steps in solving the mobile and web crossover issues which website owners and developers face when people view the site from any device other than a normal computer (I-phone / mobile phone / PDA etc).

Once a website is connected to our service and when someone visits your site, a live request is sent to us, and we return a result back to you on a live basis with details of the device, screen size, GEOIP, make, model and many other fields of information.

From that point, you can do one of two things:

1. Depending on the result returned, you can then display an appropriate view for the consumer i.e. A website that will fit their device's screen size and UI which is controlled by the way in which they are browsing (i-phones suit touch screen menus, N95's suit joystick controls and so on...)

2. If option 1 is too much of a first leap, after you add the code into your website, you can just login to our online reporting system and view your traffic results based on device make, model, country, city etc... This would be a great first step in understanding whether you are getting traffic to your site from non traditional browsing devices.

As I mentioned, we are in Beta stage, so we would value your feedback on this. Also, if you know of anyone else who may be interested in participating in this Beta stage, I would be grateful if you could pass this message on...

Regards,

David Manjra
skype: dmanjra

2 Answers:

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Hi David, as much as I like the idea don't you need to inspect the user agent profile? How will your system work when some network operators are using content adaptation engines which sit in the middle of the phone and where the request is going to. You can find out what I mean by looking at: http://www.betavine.net/bvportal/application/guest/projects/resources/mics Kind regards, Nicholas.
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Hi Nicholas, Reply from Richard our Technical Director : You're right of course, content adapters which strip all device identification information make it impossible to tailor a mobile experience. However, in the URL you provided there would be two options. Option 1, the best option, is to pass the full headers to our service and let it 'work it out'. For example, we can pull out the x-Device-User-Agent header in this case for a successful detection. We add these cases as they become known to us, so we'll have something in place for that header shortly (thanks for alerting us to that one). Option 2 would be for a website to take the x-Device-User-Agent and put that into a user-agent query to handsetdetection.com - However the idea is to make it easier on the websites, so option 1 is really the easiest. Thanks for your post.

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