Blogs

Pekka Ollikainen's article on mobile device detection with 51Degrees.mobi originally appeared in the July 2012 edition of the Software Developers Journal. He has kindly provided us permission to republish the article.

On 11th July 2012 I held a web seminar with DotNetNuke titled "Take Your Site Mobile with 51Degrees.mobi and DNN". A recording of the web seminar is available on the DotNetNuke web site. We received far more questions than I was able to answer in the time! This blog post contains a consolidated list of questions and answers. Please use the comments if you have any follow up questions. Thank you.

New 51Degrees.mobi premium device data now available for PHP and .NET.

New 51Degrees.mobi device data for PHP and .NET.

On 1st June 2012 I'll be arriving a Bletchley Park in the UK with a backpack, tent, sleeping bag and a set of slides for Over the Air 2012. This blog post contains a link to those slides, as well as video and other useful stuff relevant to the event.

Find out what's new at 51Degrees.mobi in our May 2012 news letter.

51Degrees.mobi, the leading provider of device detection and web optimisation solutions, has expanded its portfolio to include PHP. The PHP scripting language is powerful and flexible, making it a popular choice for web site developers. Around a third of all websites currently use PHP.

This means even more developers and site owners can now discover whether the visiting device is a tablet, whether it's a smart phone, what the screen size is – and they can then adjust the online content accordingly.

The weather outside may be a typically damp British April - but here at 51Degrees.mobi there's not a cloud in the sky. We've developed a mobile device detection solution that doesn't rely on a ‘cloud' connection every time there's a new visitor to your mobile web site.

As far as we're concerned, cloud services are very well-suited to location-based services and other applications that require vast quantities of data. They're also often a practical solution when information needs to be shared but needs to be controlled or monitored as well.

However, mobile device detection is a completely different type of situation.

If you don't have a web site designed for mobile phones, you don't just risk frustrating your customers when they visit you online. You're also likely to drain their smartphone batteries. That's the message from a research team based at California's Stanford University.

The researchers published a paper entitled “Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption” at the World Wide Web 2012 conference last week. They used an Android handset to browse a variety of popular web sites, measuring the phone's energy consumption as it loaded and rendered web pages. As well as analysing each page, the team also measured the energy needed to render individual web elements such as images, JavaScript, and CSS.

Enabling your website for mobile visitors doesn't just improve the consumer experience. It also makes commercial sense.

The latest organisation to produce figures that prove what we've known for a long time is UK-based search marketing agency Mediarun. It's found that ‘bounce rates' from mobile devices are around 40%, which is about 10% higher than on desktop browsers. The company says this means 5.6% of all mobile traffic is being lost by online retailers... and that's a significant amount of lost sales.