There are some properties that are meaningful for many aspects of a mobile device. An image format can be supported or not supported in the browser, in the MMS client, can be used as a wallpaper and so on.
Think of MP3, it can be a ringtone, it can be a background sound in an MMS slideshow and it can be embedded in a video. Videos can be downloaded or streamed and in the last couple of years even video ringtones have appeared.
You can have a list of properties in which each of them has its own name, so you might have mms_gif, browser_gif, wallpaper_gif. This can be effective, but at the same time you are always just meaning GIF, nothing else. Is it really worth to have many different property names for something that is, in fact, the same thing?
We are then considering quite a few possibilities and combinations for our device database. I’d like to hear comments and suggestions from our community. Do you think it is worth to be able to use the same property name in different contexts? If the answer is yes, what are the contexts that are interesting for you? I have some ideas myself, but I really want to hear from our readers.
If you had to define properties about browsers, would you want a category (should I call it “namespace”?) called “Browser” or would you want to distinguish between “Web Browser” and “WAP Browser”? The difference is certainly going to be less in the next months and years, but we still want to keep track of all the old devices and devices that are being sold these days and still don’t have the cool features of the iPhone or Nokia’s webkit-based browser or Opera Mini
