PavingWays

The PavingWays team, will take part in a hot event that will take place in San Francisco on November 6, 2006. The “mobile2.0 conference” is a one-day event organized and hosted by Daniel Appelquist (Mobile Monday London), Mike Rowehl (Mobile Monday Silicon Valley) and Gregory Gorman (The Open Group).

We actually planned to be in San Francisco from the middle of November, but re-scheduled because of this event. Michael(tm) Smith form Opera will also be there - I met him at this year’s Xtech conference in Amsterdam where I presented the CarCulatr - our first mobile AJAX web application based on the Opera Platform.

We’re eager to meet as many people as possible from the mobile web industry, for example Tony Fish, since we recently purchased his book on “Mobile Web 2.0″ (written with Ajit Jaokar) we purchased recently.

Please get in touch with us, if you wanna meet up during or after the conference - we’ll be in San Francisco until early December. After that we will head towards Boston where I will attend this year’s XML Conference - this time as co speaker, but more on that later on.

A little while ago Team IEMobile posted an interesting article on their blog about changes in the User-Agent string that is sent to the web server when the browser requests a document.
The browser of the Windows Mobile OS will undergo a rather radical change concerning this browser identification string that is often used by web developers to detect the browser in order to take advantage of it’s unique features. Unfortunately the schema of the User-Agent string was not clear to many website creators in the past. Even the MSN website had problems of detecting the mobile IE correctly.

The browser of current and older Windows Mobile versions sends two different User-Agent strings, depending on what platform the OS runs on:

• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240×320)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176×220)

Unfortunately the User-Agent string may or may not contain certain parts, for example the resolution information or even the “MSIE 4.01″. Therefore the only sure shot you can have at detecting the older and current Mobile Internet Explorers correctly is by detecting both “Smartphone” or “PPC” and “Windows CE“.

However this will change with the new version of the browser that comes out on new devices sporting the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS.
For new devices the IE Mobile User-Agent string will look like this:

(more…)