Device Detection

Tablet device sales have been declining in recent years. In Dec '17, our data showed that 59.83% of our clients' web traffic came from mobile devices, with 16.22% of that coming from tablets. While not a formidable figure compared to smartphones, it still represents a large enough share to show that brands and e-commerce sectors still need to respect that tablet usage is still present and they need granular device data to optimise their online content. In this article, we take a look at the most popular tablets globally and Apple's dominance in the tablet market.

Adform partners now benefit from the fastest and most accurate device detection improving yield through better device targeting and enhanced analytics in the programmatic environment.

In August 2017, 51Degrees wrote an article outlining Samsung Internet usage trends. We revisit the usage trends four months on and highlight what has changed.

This video demonstrates the problems Publishers still face, but will often deny they need to address, with regard to optimising content for mobile devices. We share a typical user experience using facts from real world tests on popular news sites.

In July 2017, after eight long years of deliberation, the European Patent Office (EPO) finally granted Afilias Technologies Ltd patent EP2245836B1 "Determining a property of a communication device". 51Degrees, the company I founded and still run, opposed this patent not because we think it affects any of our current products but because it attempts to monopolise the earlier WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) solution now run by ScientiaMobile along with other well-known computing techniques.

Sitecore is delighted to announce its formal partnership agreement with 51Degrees. 51Degrees will be Sitecore's Device Detection service provider. Sitecore is a leader for eight years running in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for web content management. 51Degrees already provides Device Intelligence to over 1.5 million websites worldwide.

We check out the re-release of an old favourite feature phone and test the device detection results. The new Nokia 3310 does not have a standard User-Agent compared to the majority of mobile devices we detect. The User-Agent for the Nokia 3310 comes as part of the HTTP header produced by Opera Mini, which is the pre-installed data-saving browser for this device.

This essential blog compares the approach used by 51Degrees and DeviceAtlas. It describes the high-level operation of each product, areas of difference and associated intellectual property. In simple terms, it will help readers match products to common use cases and formulate tests for evaluation.

51Degrees is regularly evaluated against competitors DeviceAtlas and WURFL from ScientiaMobile for performance, accuracy and memory consumption. This blog post builds on the previous performance blog from 2016 with the same commodity hardware; 1) a Raspberry Pi, 2) a low-end desktop PC and 3) a high-end multi CPU server, but using an all new algorithm.

In 2015 we released a detailed blog on Device Detection for Apple iPhone and iPad. Since then Apple has released many more devices. Identifying Apple devices can be challenging and when putting plans in place to optimise websites for mobile devices like Apple, companies have two choices. Try and run a solution internally or simply have 51Degrees do the work for you with the added benefits of the Apple device properties we provide in our data files.

Because we endeavour to support companies and hobbyists with our unique open source solutions, we are sharing some JavaScript that will enable you to set up an internal solution if you wish. We would, however, encourage you to save yourself the time and effort and use our data files to support your strategic website optimisation decisions.