Jochem Prins » Mobile

The iPhone vs the old phones

Jochem — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:28:41 +0000

Just came across this funny movie about the iPhone’s attitude…

Mobile device detection with PHP: 2 methods compared

Jochem — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:03:24 +0000

I’ve been working on a mobile version of the (dutch) translation website I founded. Apart from releasing the mobile site itself, it’s of course also important to make people aware of the existence of it. That’s exactly the reason why I started looking for a script that performs mobile device detection. The aim of such a script is to detect who visits the www-version of my website with a mobile device and automatically redirect those visitors to the mobile site.

Within a couple of minutes I already found a couple of php-scripts that perform the trick. After reading through the code and checking some comments on blogs I ended up with two candidates:

1) A script by Andy Moore on mobiForge
2) A script by Russell Beattie

That left me with the next dillema, which one to pick?

In order to answer this question, I defined the 2 main criteria that are important for the implementation on my website:

1) Code execution time: on a high traffic website, you want the code to be as efficient as possible
2) Mobile device coverage: detect as many mobile devices as possible (coverage)

This is probably a good time to mention the great WURFL project (open-source). WURFL is absolutely a great resource when you’re developing for mobile devices. Essentially, it’s a XML configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of many mobile devices. I used this resource for testing the scripts above.

Testing and results

For both candidates, I looped through all user-agents in the WURFL file (9457) and tested:
- the average time required to check if this user-agent belongs to mobile device or not
- if this user-agent is detected as a mobile device or not

And the results are…

Average execution time
- mobiForge script: 0,0078 seconds
- Russell’s script: 0,0021 seconds

Device coverage
- mobiForge scripts: 82,8%
- Russell’s scripts: 81,9%

In other words, Russell’s script runs faster but the script from mobiForge has a slightly better coverage. However, I think the small difference in coverage can almost be neglected since the biggest part of the mobile web users are all using one of the popular mobile devices (N95, HTCs etc). Both scripts have absolutely no problem detecting these. Furthermore, you can easily extend the list of mobile user-agents in both scripts (I already added the iPhone). Based on these findings, I decided to implement Russell’s script and it’s working just fine.

Oh… and in case you’re wondering, the mobile version of vertalen.nu will be released within the coming week.

WAP is dead, but what’s the future of mobile?

Jochem — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:18:57 +0000

WAP has never been a big success, I guess the possibilities were just a bit too limited. I’m sure however that within a couple of years, the mobile web will be (at least) as important as the web is today. We already see a growth in the availability of mobile accessible websites and the first location-based services are available.

How will the mobile web emerge in the coming years? That’s the main subject of the future of mobile conference. I just registered, hope it will be an inspiring day!

Interesting acquisition: Nokia buys Navteq

Jochem — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:54:08 +0000

A very interesting acquisition today: Nokia acquired map-provider Navteq for $8.1 billion. This is especially interesting since Navteq is one of the major suppliers of digital maps, they provide mapping data to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Another supplier of mapping-data, Tele Atlas, was acquired by TomTom earlier this year.

Personally I expected Google to buy Navteq. For the last couple of months, Google has made clear that they expect a lot of their mapping service (maps.google.com). I can’t imagine that they like the idea of being dependent on nokia. However, another company will even have a worse feeling about this acquisition: Garmin. Garmin currently gets their data from Navteq, that however means that they are now a customer of a big competitor (nokia). Switching to Tele Atlas isn’t much better since that company is owned by another competitor, TomTom. That leaves them in a difficult situation.

For the customers however, this is only good news. I expect nokia to enter the navigation-market with some very interesting products. Given nokia’s background, an internet-connected navigation device cannot be far away.