Mobile Device Detection

Proposed Datamodel

• ID (PK)
• DATE / TIMESTAMP
• USER_AGENT (VARCHAR 4096) but with a pretty high max as user agent strings are freeform and contain a lot stuff)
• FEATURES, as <key=value> pairs separated by a comma, maybe as TEXT so we can arbitrarily add more features in the future without ALTER TABLE statements. Maybe we should store is in JSON format.
• IP Address (maybe), strictly not necessary but could be nice to track adoption of new devices and see what devices are where popular (also as a workaround for the HTTPS issues that are making it hard to do geocoding)
• X-WAP-PROFILE headers, in particular 4 headers are currently used:
  • x-wap-profile
  • Profile
  • wap-profile
  • X-Wap-Profile-Diff
• Other potentially useful X-headers include:
  • x-h3g-network-quality
  • x-roaming
  • x-h3g-device-name

Maybe we want to capture all X-headers as they are so random and it is hard to predict which ones are useful.

Mobile Device Features to Detect

• Screen
  • Height
  • Width
  • Available Height
  • Available Width
  • Color Depth
  • Pixel Depth

• HTML5
  • Audio
  • Video
  • Local Storage
  • AJAX
    • AJAX xhr type
    • Manipulate DOM
    • Manipulate CSS
    • Support events

• Misc
  • Cookie support
  • File upload
  • Javascript Support
  • Vendor (navigator.vendor)
  • Platform (navigator.platform)

Mobile Device Features Not Possible to Detect

• Probably Media could be another section, separate from HTML5, with audio, video, graphics.
• Java/J2ME version
• Version of JS and CSS
• External storage, Phones typically have a maximum size of SD card, if they support external storage.
• Processor, speed and internal memory
• WML
• 2G, 2.5G, 3G, HSDPA, 4G

Implementation

We might want to use (a subset) of modernizr.js