Device Detection

This week introduces EXPLAY's newest smartphone Rio which was released in June 2014 and also Icemobile Prime 4.0 elegant and capable smartphone that was first seen in May 2014.

Detecting mobile devices is important as websites designed with large desktop computer screens in mind rarely perform well on a mobile device. Detecting such devices allows you to present content in the right fashion for the viewing device which improves website performance for your visitors and leads to better user experience. You will find many device detection products on the market and they all claim to be the fastest and most accurate but they do not provide proof. 51Degrees device detection solution achieves 99.97 percent accuracy with 5 million detections per second on hardware that costs less than 1000 USD which makes our solution the fastest, most efficient and hence most environmentally friendly. 51Degrees device detection is easy to deploy in PHP, .NET, Java, Perl, Python and C. In this article you will find test results for the 3 test hardware platforms we used as well as instruction on how to test our device detection solution in your environment in just 4 easy steps.

Following live trials lasting more than 6 months we're delighted to announce version 3 of the 51Degrees device detection solution is fully released.

Available to all, including free Lite users, key improvements include:

• Over 100 times faster device detection
• Reduced memory consumption and faster start up times
• Automatic image optimisation (PHP, Java and .NET)
• Future proof algorithms supporting potentially millions of device combinations

This week 123 new devices have been added to the device detection database, including Micromax Bolt A59 and Bolt A66.

Smart TVs, glasses, watches and other devices are the future of web content consumption and 51Degrees has added support for website owners to offer optimised experiences for these new technologies. Gesture and voice controls will become the new touch & swipe and users will interact with digital content in a completely different way.

51Degrees.mobi device detection solution, available in C, PHP, .NET and Java platforms, has been recently ported to Python.

This article presents the solution, introduces the different Python packages composing the product and shows the implementation of a couple of simple use cases.

The ability to detect mobile devices is an important part of website and web application design. Over the last year, requests to sites from mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones have risen to almost 20% of total web traffic. As well as this, dozens of new devices with varying screen sizes, input methods and capabilities are released onto the market all the time. Keeping up with this diversity is a nessecery but difficult task for any organisation maintaining a presence on the web. A good solution is to use a Device Description Repository to detect mobile devices through the browser header and its User Agent. 51Degrees.mobi's professionally maintained device data makes this process easy to implement and stays current through automatic updates.

51Degrees.mobi has been selected as a finalist in the Mobile Entertainment Awards. Here is why we think we should win!

Understanding what devices are browsing your website and their capabilities is key to optimising your website for mobile. I have put together some small code examples showing how you can gain this sort of knowledge using 51Degrees Device Detection, allowing you to fully optimise your mobile users web experience.

51Degrees Mobile Theme Switcher for Drupal allows you to take existing content and offer it to mobile users with an optimised theme. You can quickly, easily and cost-effectively optimise your Drupal website for mobile performance by following this blog.