Handset Detection on Handset Detection

Prepping updates for HD5

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 05:00:41 +0000

We’ve been busy at work prepping for HD5, its been a while coming. The prep work, mainly in rule adjustments across our device, platform, browser and app database has been extensive, but is now almost complete. YAY !

As part of the migration to HD5 we’re culling our white label option which will be formally decomissioned on January 15th, 2018. The feature never really got the kind of traction we had hoped for so it will be discontinued.

If you’re currently making use of the white label service you’ll shortly receive an email outlining the following transition process.

1) Control Panel : There’s nothing you need to do here. From January 15 the white label login page will be redirected to our standard login page. You will be able to login, view your dasboard, site profiles and analytics.

2) Adjust your detection hosts from your white label domain to api.handsetdetection.com

You should be all set.

Happy Detecting :-)

Richard

Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash

Web Design for the IoT Generation

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 21:58:06 +0000

Web design used to be a simple affair. Code it up, load it up, sit back and enjoy the traffic.

[takes sip of martini]

But over the last 12 years. It has become more and more complicated. Mainly because of the rise in the number and types of devices which are now web enabled.

In 2007, the first iphone brought with it, the ability to browse websites in desktop mode – ground breaking at the time. Pre-iphone, phone screens were low res, small and desperately needed a dumbed down web version. Remember WAP? *shivers*

Then the iPad, and tablets in general. Next came touch screen laptops and finally – IoT – where we all went out and bought an internet enabled fridge.

[anybody?]

Maybe just me then.

All of these changes have created challenges in the design of websites. For mouse browsing environments, things just got better. For touch enabled environments, sometimes it worked, sometimes it became a nightmare. For Smart TVs, we learnt just how difficult it is to navigate a website using a TV remote control. Finally, for screenless IoT devices, a brand-new challenge awaits.

Along all of these advancements and evolutions, one thing has remained consistent. The genuine need to detect which devices are accessing your content and then, understand the specs of those devices to enable you to display an optimised UI and navigational environment.

That’s where we come in folks…

Connecting handsetdetection.com into your sites allows you to optimise UI for every visitor. Our BI dashboard also allows you to view which types of device are viewing your site right now – ideal when you are making the case for a more proactive device optimised environment.

Want to know more about how we can help? Feel free to reach out…

Navigational UI – Revenge of the Hamburger

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 21:05:00 +0000

It is going to take a lot to follow that title – but here goes…

Web browsing happens on a massive range of device sizes and types, and with that, comes the need to be compatible with a broad range of screen sizes – even devices without screens such as google home and Amazon Alexa. Developers have tried a number of ways to simplify this – responsive design being an obvious one to mention, along with many other plug-ins which I won’t be covering here.

For simple websites, responsive navigation techniques might just suffice – but for enterprise grade sites or transactional websites, a lot of user interaction is just failing. Failing badly.

With navigation, we have seen a trend for full navigation bars to be condensed down into a hamburger style expandable menu and it rarely works well. Often lost in the content or located at the top (or at the bottom) of the page, you force the site visitor to look – and look hard to find it.

So how do you do it properly?

With a service like Handset Detection integrated into your website, you can set up some simple but detailed rules based on various device compatibilities and screen sizes. By doing this, you can ensure that the navigation displayed is entirely compatible with the device being used to view your website. Enable features which you know will work for each device and omit elements which won’t. Don’t just create a mobile, tablet and desktop version, create versions which ensure browser and UI compatibility. Examples like incompatible expandable sub menus and similar can then be controlled and displayed based on device type. Navigation becomes a pleasant experience for the user and you can focus on delivering quality content to them.

Real insight into what types of devices are browsing your site – right now!

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Handsetdetection.com analytics – the low down.

The handsetdetection.com platform is used by some of the very largest digital businesses and agencies to enable customised user content (and experience) to enable the very best engagement with each visitor to websites and other digital environments.

But there is so much more.

You have probably seen the handsetdetection dashboard, visible when you log in. Once you have connected individual sites to the service, there is a click through to site-specific analytics – and that’s when you start to get in-depth information about the devices currently browsing your site. Live, real time data on device type, browser type, handset/device manufacturer, screen size and OS.

With this information, you can instantly start to understand the priorities for content customisation. For example, and as we know, certain mobile OS platforms are more compatible than others when it comes to ‘hover over’ site features and pop up information boxes. Knowing the device allows you to deliver the right environment – critically important for shopping cart and other e-commerce environments.

Also, from a UI point of view, if you learn that a high percentage of your web traffic comes from smart TVs, a navigation system which is more compatible with a remote control would be a serious consideration.

Any questions? Feel free to reach out. We love to chat.

Website Device Detection

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We all share the same objective – To create the very best user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) for our website visitors.

In recent years, websites have been able to offer simple viewing adjustments, known as responsive sites, which makes slight adjustments to the site layout depending on what device is viewing – but it is basic and extremely limited.

There is a better way.

An enterprise grade way of ensuring the very best experience for users.

Handset Detection ‘device detection’. Running since 2008, our service gives you access to information relating to thousands of different devices viewing your website right now. With our server/cloud side detection API linkage to your site, you can instantly provide custom views for each and every visitor.

Engage enhanced compatibility for your users: A ‘same for all’ content policy just doesn’t work well. Some content doesn’t play nicely with the iPhone web browser and some content just doesn’t display correctly on android.

The joy of modern technology…

You can stop pushing unviewable and incompatible content to users on IOS right now and turn your android users browsing experience up to 11. Deliver perfect user experiences to all your customers.

To get started, sign up for one of our plans. If you are a business, we would recommend selecting one of our bullet-proof business plans with enterprise level SLAs.

Need data before undertaking extra work on your website? Start analysing traffic immediately using our web analytics service which can be viewed at your handsetdetection.com dashboard.

View all our plans here

Responsive Design - The rise and fall

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Responsive – it’s a great name and the concept is a simple one. The site adjusts its layout, based on browser size rather than device. When setting up the new website, you upload different image sizes (usually three sizes) and the responsive CMS does the rest.

Sounds great – right?

Well, almost.

In some cases, for simple websites, it’s a one size fits all solution [or three in this case], but you get the principle.

But, if you have been in digital long enough, you know that it is never that simple. The actual device capabilities play a major part in capabilities and user experience – particularly in e-commerce and other more complex web environments and sites. The more complex the content, the more you are at the mercy of the browser being using.

Hover-over features, which you find in a lot of e-commerce product sites are a very popular feature, offering a break out box with further product information – but for some browsers, including the iPhone browser, it is not always compatible. In other cases, pop-up info windows can be butchered (technical term) in some android browsers. Couple this with adverts which display oversized making it impossible for mobile users viewing it to find a way to minimise that advert. And I have not even mentioned the ‘hamburger’ menu yet. The responsive sites solution for mobile screens is the hamburger menu. This is represented by the original navigation menu evolving into a few horizontal lines which, when clicked, reveals a list of navigational pages. The problem is that a lot of the hamburger menu links are a similar colour and difficult to find – not great for user experience.

The solution? True Handset Detection and device detection. Once you connect handsetdetection.com to your website, you are able to deliver true designed user interfaces and experiences that plays to the strength of each site visitor. You will be able to deliver 100% compatible sites and shopping carts to ensure that no sale is lost and no UI is ruined by incompatibility. What’s more, you can also view all of this on a live basis from within our analytics dashboard.

And there is more…

Our device detection ad serving service allows you to ensure that the correct size and compatible adverts are delivered to the site visitor.

Now is the time to refine every customers UI and UX. Expectations are high. Competition is fierce. Let’s get it done right.

Want to chat about how we could help your business? We love to talk. Feel free to drop us a line at hello@handsetdetetion.com

Detect Faster

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 05:00:41 +0000

Detect Faster !

This week we’ve completed an overhaul of our device detection rule set. The change makes our detection tables 25% smaller which results in a 15% to 25% performance improvement. Updates are live now and apply to all HD3 and HD4 customers. The optimization came about for work we’re doing on HD5.

Under the hood we’ve begun a database migration from MongoDB to Posgtres for our operating core. Migrating from NoSQL to SQL essentially means re-writing large amounts of the database backend (ouch), however it also provides a great opportunity to revist the way we do things.

So far we’ve ported our rule inspection system and the results are amazing. The Postgres trigrams module allows us to query for rule fragments in near real time on hundreds of millions of http user-agents and device build identifiers. This new capability has enabled us to ship these improvements this week.

We’ve got our eyes on a few more improvements as well in the lead up to HD5, so watch this space.

Happy Detecting :-)

Richard

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash

Detect All Device Types

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 05:00:41 +0000

Detect all things - even the TV!

Since our launch in 2008, there have been a lot of changes to the digital world. Most of them exciting, including the ability to browse the web from your fridge, but that’s a whole other story. One of the most interesting recent platforms is in home entertainment, that being the connected TV and gaming devices.

For most, we still use them for traditional viewing of broadcast content and apps like Netflix, but there is so much more .. Most smart TVs and gaming devices can now browse the web and have built-in or third party browsing solutions.

Great!

Well almost, because, as most of us do not have mice or keyboards connected to our TV and gaming consoles, it creates an entirely incompatible browsing experience when people visit your website from their smart device. Users have to navigate your website using the TV ‘up; down; left; right’ buttons which is not the smoothest experience - as anyone who has tried it knows.

And so, to the fix: Handset detection smart device detection takes care of it. In addition to detecting every device browsing the web, we also detect every smart device. You can immediately start serving compatible content and navigation to all of your customers and sit visitors. As smart devices become more of the norm, your website needs to be ready for the influx of visitors from these devices - or quickly lose out to more compatible competitor sites.

Want some insight into your existing traffic? You can do that too. Just connect handsetdetection.com to your existing website and start viewing the existing smart device traffic on the dashboard. Simple as ABC (or NBC in some cases).

Happy Detecting :-) David

Device Database Updates with RSS

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 05:00:41 +0000

We’ve recently added RSS feeds for devices, platforms, browsers and apps. Its the prefect way to follow along with additions and updates to our real time detection database.

Feeds are as follows :

Devices : https://www.handsetdetection.com/devices/index.xml

Platforms : https://www.handsetdetection.com/platforms/index.xml

Browsers : https://www.handsetdetection.com/browsers/index.xml

Apps : https://www.handsetdetection.com/apps/index.xml

Feeds are updated daily with the latest additions.

You can also view the whole database over at our device database properties page.

Happy Detecting :-)

Improving Apple Device Detection Accuracy

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 00:00:01 +0000

Apple’s devices have always presented a challenge for web analytics companies as all their devices, for each device family, use the same HTTP headers or User-Agent. This makes differentiating between different iPhone models impossible using web requests alone.

Example iPhone User-Agent Headers

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B329 Safari/8536.25
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11D201 Safari/9537.53

Apple User-Agent headers contain no device model information.

Sources : Apple iPhone User-Agents

Example Android User-Agent Headers

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.1.1; SAMSUNG SM-N910C Build/LMY47X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) SamsungBrowser/2.1 Chrome/34.0.1847.76 Mobile Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.1.1; Pixel XL Build/NMF26U) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.91 Mobile Safari/537.36

Android User-Agent headers contain device model information.

Sources : Google Pixel XL User-Agents Samsung SM-N910C User-Agents

To address this challenge, back in 2012, we introduced a small javascript snippet which builds a device fingerprint that can assist in detecting the device. The snippet takes the device screen size, the display pixel ratio and combines that with a micro benchmark to produce a what we call a fingerprint.

Fingerprints look like this ‘320:480:100:110’. There’s no personally identifying information in there, just a few attributes about the hardware of the device that helps our detection engine hone in on the correct device.

Today we’re tweaking that snippet to reduce the variablilty of the benchmark, plus we’re providing a new URL Express customers can use to improve accuracy even further.

The previous version of the script made up to 20 1ms benchmark runs and averaged the results. This produced a wide range of numbers which we reasoned would be close to consistent when averaged out, however recent testing has proven that we gain a more consistent result if instead of averageing we simply take the highest result.

Customers using v4 Express detection (javascript) have no changes to make as the scripts have been updated for this already. Customers using Cloud or Ultimate detection can grab an updated script from the new GitHub repo we’ve just spun up at JS Helper.

Technical Discussion

As mentioned previously, the fingerprinting benchmark takes up to 20 x 1ms benchmarks over 50ms. We chose 50ms as we felt it was a resonable tradeoff between stressing the device and getting the data we need. However, in some cases, it may be desirable to run the benchmark for longer and collect more test results for a more accurate view of the device’s hardware. It should be noted that performing longer benchmarks does impact user experience, so please use this wisely.

The new express detection script can be called with this URL //api.handsetdetection.com/apiv4/jsplus/SiteID/Duration.js where SiteID is the ID of your website profile and Duration is the duration of the test in milliseconds. In testing we’ve seen excellent results with benchmarks upto 500ms (¹⁄₂ a second).

Device detection for Logstash !

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 05:00:41 +0000

Ever wanted a high performance device detection plugin for Logstash ?

Well, wait no longer, we’ve just released one ! :-) Full details on plugin configuration and installation are available at our Device Detection for Logstash repo. The plugin can also detect browsers, operating systems (platforms) and apps.

It also supports “ultimate”, “community” and “cloud” detection methods. Cloud detection sends requests to our servers for resolution. Ultimate and Community are both super fast local detection methods which run on your own servers.

If you would like to take it for a spin on the full Ultimate edition reach out and we’ll tee up an eval. We’re keen for feedback.

Happy Detecting :)

New Global Locations

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 05:00:41 +0000

Just a quick note today to let you know that we’ve added two new global locations, Sydney (Oceania) and Singapore (Asia) to our global of points of presence.

This makes detection requests for customers using Cloud (our API web service) and Express (our javascript detection snippet) much snappier in the Asia pacific region.

Sydney and Singapore join Germany and USA as countries where we host clusters.

Handset Detection Community Edition

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 05:00:41 +0000

Today we’re really excited to announce our API v4 Community Edition. Hooray !

Our Community Edition is a free, high performance, server side device detection solution which provides a slightly reduced device schema and the full suite of patterns for detecting platforms, browsers and apps.

Community Edition device specs include the following fields :

general_vendor
general_model
general_platform
general_platform_version
general_browser
general_browser_version
general_app
general_app_version
general_app_category
display_x
display_y
benchmark_min
benchmark_max
display_pixel_ratio
display_css_screen_sizes

For reference : compare it to the Full Schema. Other fields are defined however their values are empty.

All API kits have been updated with convenience methods for downloading and installing the Community Edition. See your API kit of choice at our GitHub repo.

Documentation is available at our documentation hub.

Android Attack 2016 - Infographic

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 05:00:41 +0000

We’ve dug deep into the history vault to grind out some juicy stats about android devices. In this installment we’re comparing Android devices from 2014, 2015 and early 2016. Samsung still rules the Android roost and small screen sizes are on the way out.

Enjoy,

Cheers,

Richard

Monster Update – Detection for the Internet of Everything

admin@handsetdetection.com (Handset Detection) — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 10:08:21 +0000

This week we’ve released a major update to Handset Detection with new pricing plans and, most importantly, the final round of API v4 updates for Cloud and Ultimate detection. Lets break each of these down to see how they work.

Pricing Plans, Subscriptions and Payments

We’ve re-jigged the way our pricing works. The way we had Ultimate plans associated with a site and u sage plans associated with your account was crazy and very very unintuitive. So we’ve cleaned all that up and all plans are now associated directly with your account.

Also, we’ve added annual plans !

Cloud and Express annual plans have 20% more detections than their monthly equivalents, plus you get a month free. Ultimate plans now get a base 100,000 detections per month for web service use, so you can have play around with things while getting set up. We’ve also re-scoped the way Ultimate plans work, so rather than purchasing licences in blocks (1, 2-4, 5-10, 11-20) you can now nominate a quantity, and the prices have come down, way down in some cases. Login and checkout the new Ultimate pricing.

Paypal is dead ! Long live Paypal.

We’ve removed Paypal Express Checkout Subscriptions completely from our service. All payments are now made via card-on-file, through ….. Paypal. Our real motivator was that Express Checkout was making life difficult for us and some of you. Express Checkout didn’t allow us to alter subscriptions for you, updating cards was messy, subscriptions would get canceled when payment methods changed, handling expired cards was awful. It was just plain janky. So we’ve finally done away with that nonsense.

About 25% of you are still using Paypal Express Checkout subscriptions and thats fine .. it’ll keep ticking over. When it comes time to change your subscription just upgrade from the ‘Upgrade/Change Plan’ page and we’ll switch you into the new system.

One note : If you change your subscription and you’re paying with Paypal then you will need to manually cancel your old Paypal subscription after you’ve upgraded. Reach out if you have any hassles and we’ll help step you through the process.

API v4 Updates

APIv4 is now fully here. We’ve expanded Handset Detection into Detection for the Internet of Everything. In addition to tablets, handsets, TV’s, games consoles, mobile browsers and mobile operating systems we’ve added computers (desktops, laptops, notebooks), bots, libraries, sensors, appliances and vehicles as first class devices.

Desktop operating systems (Windows, Linux, OS X and more) have also been added, along with desktop browsers (Firefox, Chrome etc..), and mobile apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flipboard etc.. We’ll be massively expanding our apps selection over the next few weeks.

Last, but not least, we’ve added a new detection method : Build Info Detection. If you’re running apps on any Android, iOS or Windows device, simply grab the build information, pass it to our service and we’ll tell you what the device is. Simple, Fast & Easy. Examples are coming shortly to the Help Center.

Phew ! Well thats the biggest update post ever, but its been a while so it seems fair.

Happy Detecting

Richard