Tomorrow we’re rolling out a major overhaul of our browser and operating system (platform) detection. The main thrust of this release is to make our results more consistent across the board. If you’re making use of this feature then there’s a few changes you should know about.

All Apple devices will now report as iOS, not a mixture of iOS and iPhone OS, with Mobile Safari as the browser, rather than just ‘Safari’, to distinguish it from its desktop brother.

All versions of everything have had their 4th most significant version digits removed. For example, what was a Blackberry 9300, RIM OS 6.0.0.612 will now report as a BlackBerry 9300, RIM OS 6.0.0. This will consolidate analytics in a sane way for tracking Platform and Browser versions across differing devices.

We’ve maintained the various flavors of the Symbian renaming hijinx as per Wikipedia and added Nokia Belle.

On the browser front we’ve massively improved our coverage of the less mainstream browsers (Fennec, Bolt, Phantom, Ovi) and added more patterns for new releases of popular browsers as well (UC Browser, various Webkit flavors, Opera Mobile and Series 40 devices).

We’re considering adding a browser family tag as well, for Webkit, Gecko etc… If you’re interested in this feature please let us know in the comments below.

Happy Detecting.

Thanks & Happy Detecting.

PS : To celebrate we put out a press release :)

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Australian Technology Pioneer Handset Detection Announces One Billion Device Detections Performed

Handset Detection, an Australian Company that has gained worldwide attention for their pioneering mobile device detection technology, has reached a milestone surpassing one billion device detections.

When we first released handset detection and began the long arduous task of improving on and expanding our design, a billion detections was a long way off, a landmark we hadn’t even considered

Just a quick note to let you know that tomorrow i’ll be participating in Cnon.TV’s Perfect Pitch. My slot runs from 8:30am to 9:00am (Melbourne/Australia time) on the 26th April, which is 3:30 to 4pm on the 25th April (Vancouver/Canada time).

I’ll be sharing everything you need to know to get started with mobile plus I’ll be in the chat room answering question afterwards. Make sure you stick around to the end as well, if you like awesome bonuses that is. :-)

The cause has been found and the problem fixed. However, it will take a few days to reconstruct stats for the last 24 hours from detection history and get them into the database. Sorry for the hassle folks.

Detections and API services are not effected by this.

–Richard

Note : Stats for 2012-04-10 have now been restored.

If you’re on PHP 5.3 there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re on PHP 5.2 then you’ll need to download a new API kit and grab a new config file (here : http://code.google.com/p/hdapi/downloads/list).

Thanks & Happy Detecting.

Richard Uren spoke about his history working on the development of mobile apps for devices and websites, and his initial inspiration in creating Handset Detection.  “To deliver apps and experiences that worked great on different handsets we kept building this device detection building block over and over again. Then new handsets would come out and we would be updating dozens of builds all around the place…Having that device detection build block managed by a central service scratched that itch for us so it seemed a great candidate for a web service”

He also got a chance to make DoesWhat’s readers aware about our new HD3 detection system. “Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. There is a revamped schema, about a 100x speedup in device detection (no database, fully in memory) and a local detection option : where you can download our database, detection rules and use an api kit to perform detections locally, plus a swag of stats updates going live in April/May.”

Richard made the point that the future is bright for the industry — “the explosion of internet enabled devices is pretty exciting.”

Visit DoesWhat for the whole interview, and don’t forget – If you want to get on the HD3 advance notice list simply drop your details into this form.

Happy Detecting!

1) Click the cog (or gear) icon in your site actions.

2) Click the Javascript v3 Beta tab in the site setup.

3) Copy the script section and paste that into your webpages in place of the existing script section you’re using already.

As promised here’s why you’ll love it.

1) The new script wont slow down the loading of your website.

2) The new script will save you thousands of detections per month and you can include it on every page of your site.

Previously, each time the standard script loaded it triggered a detection. The new script is much much smarter. It only triggers a new detection if the visitor is hitting your site from an external URL, so its safe to include this on every page on your site.

This is the bit where I yammer on about the technical details. If you’re not technically minded then feel free to wrap up here while I geek out for a bit. So the new script as an async loader, which is excellent, but async loaders have been with us for while now. The real magic comes in with the combination of the async loader and the ‘new visitor’ detection. There’s no point loading the script on every page, chalking up junk detections while visitors browse around your website but, and its a big but, if you’ve got folks, perhaps mobile folks, hitting your site on pages other than your homepage then you’ll want to pick that up. That’s what makes this awesome. Here’s the magic :

internal = document.referrer.search(document.domain);

That says look for my website’s domain in the string of the referring url. No cookies, no muss no fuss. If its not there then we should load the detector and see if there’s anything we need to do. Job Done.

All accounts are setup with this now, so feel free to take it for a spin.

Happy Detecting.

Scott wrote in a month ago and let me know that we really should have custom date ranges on stats. Fair call too! Today custom date ranges on mobile stats goes live. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Got any more ideas for features you’d like to see ? Then let me know below.

Happy Detecting

Right now we’re putting the finishing touches on HD3, our new detection system. To get on the HD3 advance notice list simply drop your details into this form. The new system is a complete rethink of how a high performance detection system should work.  You’ll be able to run it from your servers or ours and its blazingly fast.

HD3 uses a new API with a new schema (in plain English that means both data format and the way its queried are different), however there is legacy mode for queries on our servers, so you’re not left high and dry when migrating from HD2. If you’re using Javascript, with that little code snippet you paste into the tops of your web pages then nothing will change.

Some existing features of Handset Detection are not coming along for the HD3 ride. Effective immediately we’re cancelling the Affiliate System for both developers and referrers. Payments will continue until July 2012.

We’ll be replacing the affiliate program next week with a referrer program. Each friend of yours that uses the service will earn both you and your friend 2500 bonus detections each month.

Happy Detecting.

Over the next few weeks we’re making a few big changes to our network to improve efficiency and performance. There will be no service disruption however IP addresses of server groups will be changing while we shuffle our computing power around and upgrade servers.

To minimize the impact on folks with Handset Detection IP addresses in firewalls we’ve created api-corpfw.handsetdetection.com as a drop in replacement for api.handsetdetection.com. This allows us to dynamically add and remove ip addresses to our existing api.handsetdetection.com alias and keep api-corpfw.handsetdetection.com as a fixed set of IP addresses. Dont worry if you dont know what that means (its really just a note to corporate IT departments acessing our API directly).

To kick things off we’ll shortly be bringing on line 176.9.20.58 & 69.64.68.80 – Woo Hoo ! :-)

Image Credit : http://www.flickr.com/photos/yallen33