Hot Mobile News
Police across England and Wales are to begin taking fingerprints while on patrol using mobile electronic devices. The hand-held gadgets – linked to a database of 6.5m prints – will enable officers to identify suspects within minutes.
Samsung revealed the first production ready WiBro convergence mobile device, the SPH-P9000, which will be available for Korean telco KTF?s customers in the first half of 2007. The SPH-P9000 is an UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) and at the same time a communication device with supports for both WiBro and CDMA2000 1X EV-DO networks.
T-Mobile has announced the arrival of a new Sidekick – Sidekick 3 – featuring instant messenger and email, a built-in camera, MP3 player and net access via its Web’n'Walk service.
Mobile Device Detection is a thorny problem on the road to the Ubiquitous Web. Brian Fling of Mobile Design has a good description of this in an item entitled The Mobile Device Detection Problem. The aim is that a website owner should be able to deliver content to whatever mobile device the visitor may be using. This is done by detecting the type of mobile device and delivering an appropriate version of the content. The item points out the difficulties in doing that for most developers. Unfortunately the link is no longer active.
Confirming the connectivity of the World Wide Web, a possible solution is outlined in the comments to the item. Luca Passani of WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) fame suggests that with WALL, a Library to Multiserve Applications on the Wireless Web, the developer’s task will be very much easier.
This still begs the question of whether programming code changes alone can modify the content sufficiently to give good user experiences to all mobile device users. The Multi-Web approach, perhaps even in combination with WURFL, still seems a more viable option.
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An easier approach to this problem is to detect desktop devices and assume everything else is mobile. I’ve written a post which includes example Python code for detecting mobile devices here:
http://notnotmobile.appspot.com