DeviceAtlas is aimed mostly to mobile web, so if this is your target DeviceAtlas should be good enough.

If you want to do more, especially about downloads, then you should consider both.
WURFL is one of the sources we use in DeviceAtlas, so on day DeviceAtlas might have all the information WURFL has, but at this time we have no plans to include some dated information such as WML.

Thank you for your reply Andrea.

Yes, I'm only interested in building mobile websites at the moment.

Are you saying that the only reason I should consider WURFL would be for applications that I might build that need to be downloaded onto a mobile device?
For the mobile web, I presume Device Atlas has a more comprehensive device database than WURFL?
Is Device Atlas easier to implement than WURFL?

Also, can Device Atlas be used to detect just one device (such as the iPhone), and feed it different content from every other device? Is the implementation of Device Atlas easier by only needing to detect and serve different content to one device (the iPhone) as opposed to all devices?

Thanks
John

John,
we think the integration of DeviceAtlas is really easy and should take something like 15 minutes to get started (starting from our very simple examples included in the documentation, for example).

I don't think detecting a single device or thousands of devices with a database like DeviceAtlas is easier or harder, once you've decided to go for something like DeviceAtlas and spent those 15 minutes you should be up and running for anything you want to do. If you really think you want to target 1 single device, then you might want to go for something homegrown with a barebone detection of that single device, but I think the time you will spend is not less than the 15 minutes you need to get started with DeviceAtlas.

WURFL is a great resource, don't take me wrong, but if you want to do mobile web development, I think DeviceAtlas should be your choice... but I'm biased. ;)

I have recently downloaded a developer license to DeviceAtlas because my company decided to do device detection trough DeviceAtlas du to the same reasons as Andrea describes above.
Though ive begun to play around with the DeviceAtlas API and it seems pretty simple but i find it very hard to find matches in cellphones.

The example states that i could test by looking up the useragent "Nokia5580" (or something) but a useragent will nerver be just that.
Let me give an example: "Nokia6230/2.0+(04.43)+Profile/MIDP-2.0+Configuration/CLDC-1.1+UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0"
I find it incomplete that the API cant figure out the lookup based on a entiere useragent string.

Note: New Smartphones like HTC Touch Dual II or HTC s730 does not excist in the DeviceAltas though they DO exists in WURFL. And only god (and DeviceAtlas) knows how many other phones/devices that dont excist in the database.

Since WURFL is free of charge and DeviceAtlas costs money, i believe that the least i could expect is that the DeviceAtlas contains AT LEAST the newest devices. (The mentioned devices are more than 6 months old...)

The fact that DeviceAtlas selects and de-selects if WML should be in the data - i just dont get it. As far as i can read in www.DeviceAtlas.com, DeviceAtlas is abour detecting device capabilities and if DeviceAtlas in generally states that they do not want to list wheater the device supports WML then they're shutting off an audience. I'm doing device detection and have WML as fallback if the device does not support any XHTML standars. I need to know if the device also supports WML. Wherever i want to use the WML support is up to me (as a customer) not at desicistion DeviceAtlas shuld make, i think.

The question is: Is DeviceAtlas device detection or is it just the dev.mobi community that provides selected info about devices (info that THEY believe is usefull) trough a framework.

I'll recomment to take a look on i.e. DetectRight.com or other since there are many other companies that provides device detection.

To the DeviceAtlas editors: I would like to hear your comments on this post, since there must be som good argument for leaving out information on device capabilities and also regardeing the problem on missing newer devices.

Hi Esben,
sorry, I do not get what you mean here. Of course you can use DeviceAtlas with a real user-agent string, in fact you should ALWAYS do that and not bother to cut it or parse it in any way. That is only an example, anyway could you direct me to the example you refer to? I'll make sure we explain better how it works.

We work every day to add new devices and new HTTP request headers. There will always be a small portion of headers that are not recognised, but of course we try to keep it as small as we possibly can. The process involves two steps, one is to have a source of information for a device and another one is having the HTTP request headers. When we have these two, we deliver the information in the JSON that you can download from our site. As a developer you are entitled to daily updates.

Our commitment is certainly to provide the best possible device detection.

Your request to have WML as a property is noted. As a company we want to look forward, look at the mobile web and its future and look at the technologies that are coming these days and not what was used 5-6 years ago. Nevertheless I see your point about old WML sites.

I wonder if you are still developing WML sites or you are considering to replace your existing device detection and replace if with DeviceAtlas. Can you tell us? (Even offline if you think a forum is not the right place to discuss your company strategies).

To me DeviceAtlas is the combination of what the administrators and developers of the software like me see for the mobile web today and tomorrow and what our developers let us understand of their needs via dev.mobi. It is really the combination of the two, certainly not a decision made by a superior intelligence that should be taken as is.

I actually used WURFL in the past but I had a hard time keeping up to date with the new devices since i was the only one working on it.
I used the WURFL to do device detection because i want to know what audio, video and image format the device supports so then i can provide people the correct file.
I was quite excited to see something like DeviceAtlas comes around from dev.mobi with Andrea (which i had known from the wurfl community) on board and was thinking of actually replacing WURFL with DeviceAtlas for my project.
But here you said, i should use both WURFL and DeviceAtlas instead of just DeviceAtlas alone? why?

I am sorry if I generated any confusion. What I mean is that with DeviceAtlas we want to solve the problems around mobile web and browsing, so we took from WURFL what we thought was most useful. Audio, video and images are part of that.

WML hasn't been picked up, we think it's old technology and actually also WURFL has moved to consider XHTML as the default. If you are still developing in WML, we would like to hear from you, maybe you should open a new thread. If you don't care about WML, then DeviceAtlas should work for you. Agian, I'd be happy to hear of any device properties that we are missing and that you need on your day-to-day development.

I figured I would offer my two cents on these issues/topics that have been mentioned:

1.) I like that you have been a contributor to WURFL. It would have been disappointing to see some company/individual (i.e., you guys) using license free data and then turning around and charging money for massaging that data. Obviously this is not the case here. :)

2.) One other device feature I would like to see is whether a device supports Flash and if so, what version (e.g., Flash Lite)

3.) WML is dead. Period. Actually I'm not entirely convinced it ever successfully caught on. Devices like iPhone and other "smart phones" are doing regular browsing now and it's only going to get better. I say look forward and not backwards. If a user cannot do in the very least XHTML MP send them to a page that politely tells them to get with the 21st century and buy a new phone. :P

Feature request noted and it's actually something we are already working on. It's easy to add a property, of course, but what we are trying to do is get some agreement in place so that we will get good data from the beginning. Think if Adobe or DoCoMo signed with us and gave us a full list of supported devices and FL versions. That would be the type of start we want for a new property.

With regards to iPhone and Nokia S60 browsers, I agree with you browsers will only improve, nevertheless, the mobile device has limitations and features that a desktop PC and browser will never have and we would like to make sure DeviceAtlas helps you to take advantage of those features. This is why we have properties like uriSchemeTel and will continue to add more.

Hello. I try to distinguish between Webbrowser and Mobilebrowser for the website nulaz.com. I am using tera_wurfl. I installed it correctly, so it works properly on the backend and also the capapilities fetching by user agents works fine. The only thing which doesn't work at all is the browser detection by using on the one hand the [is_wireless_device] => 1. For Firefox Desktopbrowser it is always set to one. Also if i use the web_patch.xml and set using patch to true in the config file it desn't work either. In that case i got also some errors: like:

A PHP Error was encountered
Severity: Notice
Message: Undefined index: user_agent
Filename: Wurfl/tera_wurfl.php
Line Number: 812

and on error like:

A PHP Error was encountered
Severity: Notice
Message: Undefined index: id
Filename: Wurfl/tera_wurfl.php
Line Number: 816

Maybe htere are problems with the fallback or similar, but i really don't know. Any kind of help or suggestions are really appreciated.
Mybe using Deviceatlas for recognizing Webbrowsers and Mobilebrowserers and WURFL for getting phone capapilities? So using both?

PS:
We also need a good way to distribute our different phone application versions for different devices by using WURFL - any reccomandations to that? We are using PHP-Codeigniter Framework.

best regards

Markus

I just came across the thread above and stumbled over my hush words. I have to admit that DeviceAtlas has come a long way over the past two years.

Today I think DeviceAtlas is the far best source for mobile detection. I use it for all the mobile websites I am working on and recommending it to people that asks about modile or device detection.

One feature I'm really crazy about for my private home-projects is http://deviceatlas.appspot.com/query .
Thats awsome. The only thing I'm missing here is the possibility to (in the query string) add whitch parameters i would like back.

Still i only see on thing missing.
I recently visited with a HTC Legend (and after that to confirm) a HTC Desire. Both are real live devices, but they are not recognized. Why? Because their user agents are not device specefic. The Htc Legen has "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/530.17,gzip(gfe)".

I don't know how to overcome that the UA doesent contain any device sprcefic data - just standard-stuff. This is clearly from the vendors side to not pick a side, but makes it harder to detect that it is a mobile device.

Device Atlas: Do you have any suggestions how to detect these devices?

(I Will try out the TA-DA when i get home from work tonight, though)

Firstly, I'd like to thank you for coming back and commenting on your original thread - it really is great to see that you've become such a supporter of DeviceAtlas :)

I've just force-updated the DeviceAtlas data on the GAE install so it's now running the most up to date device data we have, just incase there were any problems there with it.

When you get a chance to run the device through TA-DA we'll have more information about the headers your devices are sending - hopefully something in there will shed some light into this problem!

Daniel

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