Device detection approaches

Hi, I'm new here so hello to all.

I'm looking at various approaches to device detection. There are some really interesting threads here but I've not found much information regarding approaches to device detection upon connection to a WAP site.

I need to determine device capabilities like:
- screen size / color / resolution
- ringtone capability
- WML version / XHTML capability

... and probabaly more in the future.

It seems that the logical approach is to examine the HTTP request. Here's some ideas I'm kicking around:

1) HTTP_USER_AGENT - looks pretty good, but this seems to indicate the browser software being used - it may not really tell me much about the *device* itself. If it's an Opera browser, what does that tell me about the screen size?

2) HTTP_X_WAP_PROFILE - Sounds good too, you could parse the referenced RDF file and pick out whatever data you need (what a pain though). The problem here is that in my very few initial tests, I got one URI for the specs doc that started with "http://localhost/" ... you get the picture.

3) HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_SCREENPIXELS and so forth... sounds great, but these values don't come in consistently and I don't get all the data I need.

Any thoughts on all this? Thanks!

Greg Robbins

Well the last point, WML version / XHTML capability is fairly straight forward. I use this php function, credits in the source code.

You can then check the user_agent to determine what OS it is or series 60 etc....
If you are using PHP, you may want to consider this. Hope that helps a bit.