Hi All,

I was hoping for some help in finding some Beta participants out there who would be interested in trying out our new service. We have just launched in Beta mode. (its free to use). There will also be a free version after the official launch.

The first step is to browse your way over to: http://www.handsetdetection.com/

We hope that this will represent one of the first steps in solving the mobile and web crossover issues which website owners and developers face when people view the site from any device other than a normal computer (I-phone / Blackberry / PDA / Tablet PC).

Once connected to our service, when someone visits your site, a live request is sent to us, and we return a result back to you on a live basis with details of the device, screen size, GEOIP, make, model and many other fields of information.

From that point, you can do one of two things:

1. Depending on the result returned, you can then display an appropriate view for the consumer i.e. A website that will fit their device's screen size and UI which is controlled by the way in which they are browsing (i-phones suit touch screen menus, N95's suit joystick controls and so on...)

2. If option 1 is too much of a first leap, after you add the code into your website, you can just login to our online reporting system and view your traffic results based on device make, model, country, city etc... This would be a great first step in understanding whether you are getting traffic to your site from non traditional browsing devices.

As I mentioned, we are in Beta stage, so we would value your feedback on this. Also, if you know of anyone else who may be interested in participating in this Beta stage, I would be grateful if you could pass this message on...

Regards,

David Manjra
skype: dmanjra

I was looking at the screen size issue in general. IMO the display size on a "pocket computer" such as the N8*0 can't usefully go beyond about 1024x700, otherwise either it won't fit in a vest pocket or even normally sighted people will need reading glasses (I'm getting old and need 3 diopter glasses cf 1 diopter for books or normal monitors). On the other hand desktop displays will get bigger up to maybe 6000x4000, while wall displays can already go to 15,000 pixels. On the small end, my cellphone I think is 128x128 and iPhones are 480.

I had been playing with stylesheets and dynamic image resizing as a way
to generate content for different display sizes. However, I think the way to go is to use a content management system to generate entirely different
pages - the real problem is that there is just too much content on a page designed for a large display for it to work on a small display, so the solution is to break it up into more pages, show less ads or ones with
a smaller image size etc., which will also make it load faster and keep mobile users happy.

http://andrew.triumf.ca/js/alternate.css.html
http://andrew.triumf.ca/js/alternate.cssxi.html

i totally agree - you need specific views for each category of device. The browsers that shrink a whole webpage so you can fit it onto a pda screen just dont work for regular browsing. Even the way the iphone does it looks cool, but the novelty wears off quickly.

The ideal model is to set the CMS up to understand the device / handset and then either display a particular template and content, or alternatively in the case where the CMS cannot adapt, have 3 alternate sites for viewing; mobile;PDA and web.

We will be integrating with some CMS providers in time - which is one of our next steps.

For some things, like web apps, sending different content makes sense, but for most sites driven by textual content, making (X)HTML carry semantics and using CSS3 for presentation control works quite well; on small (HVGA and up) screens, you don't need to break it into more pages, you can simply flow it into a longer page. You can't just slap new CSS on an old page that was designed with presentation in the HTML, but you can redesign the page template once, and get good CSS for each category of platform.

(For selecting which stylesheet, window size detection is great, but other methods can be helpful when you get to mobiles, where input methods are important as well.)

For traditional mobile browsing (QVGA and smaller, d-pad rather than touchscreen), there will always be custom browsers, custom css, and in some cases stripped-down versions of the pages; but I don't think this segment will be around for long.

Just a quick thank you to people who took part in our phase one beta program at handsetdetection.com . We have now entered phase two, with a new release of the site with additional features and services. In the next few weeks, there will be a further release with more new advanced features.

Thanks again,

David