Distinguish Tablet UAs?

[jsocol]

In bug 671634, Firefox on Android is going to start distinguishing between phone and tablet devices.

Should mobility learn to distinguish phones and tablets? Or should we just document a best practice (make the mobile/small format responsive)? Or something else? Brainstorm, people!

[jsocol]

CCing @rlr, @potch, @davedash, @jlongster, @tofumatt

[jbalogh]

Detecting tablets seems good to me. For the current versions of amo, the desktop site is preferable to the mobile site on tablets.

[jsocol]

Nielsen says that the cut off is around 7" tablets (>7", use desktop, <7" something bigger than phones, but not desktop) which is sadly probably not detectable via UA. But making it possible to treat tablets as "full" or "small" or "tablet" would be an interesting option.

[davedash]

I think the "best practice" of responsive design is good, but we should still support detection.

Responsive design is too new to not leave people an alternative (like tablet detection).

[jsocol]

Practical stuff:

• You can distinguish between iPhone and iPad for iOS.
• Firefox is making detection possible.
• It may be possible to distinguish the Android browser on tablets. @rik is looking into it.

[rik]

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/android-browser-user-agent-issues.html

For Android, Google recommends manufacturers to not put Mobile in the UA for non-phone devices.

[jsocol]

Low and behold I am starting to work on this, because it's become relevant.

But now I'm hitting the real problem: how to practically do it? The detection is easy, but changing the API is not. A lot of the code in mobility relies on "mobile" being a boolean property.

It'll be a big change. I will throw something together and see how it goes. And how much nicer would this be if django.shortcuts.render returned a TemplateResponse? (The answer is "way nicer.")