A recent post on Hazelware (mobile device user agents) rekindled my interest in understanding the current state of mobile PDA user agent (UA) strings. Having a comprehensive list would be helpful for automatic delivery of mobile-formatted content and tracking device popularity.
To learn the types of devices that are reaching my PDA optimized website list, I analyzed the access logs from the month of December 2004. During this 31-day span, the page had a total of 9585 hits with 550 unique user agent strings. The variety of UA strings was surprising.
Following the Hazelware concept of searching on specific strings within the UA made the list much more manageable. I used a list of 19 strings to identify anything that appeared to be a mobile device. This split the data set into 7886 mobile and 1918 non-mobile (desktop browsers and search engine crawlers). About 80% of the hits to this page are from mobile devices, so that seems to make sense.
Summarizing the data like this isn’t an exact science. Because the search keywords are a mix of device manufacturer, operating system, and browser type, it’s really only useful for determining “is this a mobile user” as opposed to the exact parameters of the device in question.
Having said that, the data does present and interesting snapshot of device types:
| Agent | Total | % |
|---|---|---|
| AvantGo1 | 3570 | 45.27% |
| Windows CE | 2555 | 32.40% |
| Blazer | 736 | 9.33% |
| Palm | 559 | 7.09% |
| BlackBerry | 167 | 2.12% |
| SonyEricsson | 56 | 0.71% |
| Smartphone | 54 | 0.68% |
| MMP | 47 | 0.60% |
| Nokia | 41 | 0.52% |
| LG | 34 | 0.43% |
| NetFront | 30 | 0.38% |
| RIM | 18 | 0.23% |
| Xiino | 17 | 0.22% |
| WAP | 1 | 0.01% |
| Samsung | 1 | 0.01% |
| Grand Total | 7886 | 100.00% |
Notes: 1. I believe the “AvantGo” UA represents mostly their proxy servers as opposed to mobile devices running the AvantGo browser. I need to verify this.
To give you an idea of how varied the UA strings are (even for a single device type), here’s a sampling of “Windows CE” agents:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; 240x320)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; 320x240)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; O2 Xda 2mini; PPC; 240x320)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; O2 Xda 2s;PPC;240x320; PPC; 240x320)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; O2 Xda II;PPC;240x320)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PIEPlus 1.2; PPC; 240x320)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PIEPlus 1.2; PPC; 240x320; PPC; 240x320; SPV M2000; OpVer 5.12.2.141)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PIEPlus 1.3; PPC; 240x320; PIEPlus 1.2)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320) 4.01
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320; 240x320)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320; PIEPlus 1.1)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320; PIEPlus 1.2)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; MDA Compact/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176x220)
Some other related resources on mobile user agents include: * Mobile Browser ID (User-Agent) Strings * Sprint Phone User Agents
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