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

Looks interesting, just at the moment I'm not doing any mobile sites which would require such a technology.
API looks cool, I'll keep this in mind for future projects

It's a neat idea, and the website looks great. But...



Ugh! Sounds like browser-detection misery all over again. I'd rather serve a handheld stylesheet, thanks, or just leave the devices to work it out for themselves.

A handheld stylesheet is a standards-based method of changing your website's presentation to suit small-screen devices. It doesn't require a DNS lookup to your servers (which would slow down my website ).

Of course, your method has the "advantage" that I could create different presentations for each handheld device. But that just sounds like a huge amount of work, for dubious benefit.



Google Analytics already does this for me. Why would I use your service instead?

Actually, leaving devices work it out for themselves is probably the best option. First of all - the one which annoys me the most is the iPhone. Why the hell would you have a mobile website for the iPhone? I have one and for the love of god it displays every full size website perfectly. It's not one bit difficult or straining. Using mobile detection would be undermining it's rendering skills. The whole concept of the bloomin' iPhone was that it does not browse the mobile web - it browses the real one. Not anything in-between.

And that brings me to all other phones - which do it quite well too. All the latest Nokia, Samsung and Motorola (among others) are able to show proper web pages. Sure, you have to navigate around on it which may be a bit tedious - but this really will only bother the ones who use internet on their phone a lot.

If your site is extremely, extremely (as in extremely, very) extremely busy, like Bebo and MySpace - using a mobile stylesheet is definitely the best bet (as Mike suggested).

Ed.

I agree, especially after watching Apple's promo video.

I've shyed away from adding a handheld stylesheet, because I fear I may do more harm than good. There are too many different mobile devices; I can't possibly tailor my site for all of them.

Sure, I could use media queries to serve up different content to different devices based on their capabilities; but that's a shedload of extra work for dubious benefit; and I may end up annoying users of the more capable devices -- for example, by serving a pared-down version to the iPhone.

I'm inclined to let the mobile devices slug it out. With the iPhone offering such great web browsing capabilities, it's only a matter of time before other devices follow suit.

If your target audience is mainly mobile, then I suppose you have no choice but to plunge into this mess of hackery. But otherwise, why bother? For most websites, mobile/handheld devices account for almost none of the traffic. Let 'em stew until the standards become clearer.

eh.. how does the OpenID login work? Ik have an openID, but can't seem to log in?