You really never know what device a customer will have when they access your mobile channel – but we do. Deliver the best and richest user experience to any device, from smartphones to feature phones.
One of MobileAware’s core strengths is the ability to create optimized experiences across the mobile device spectrum. This gives operators and enterprises the assurance that users will get the most enhanced experience their devices offer.
The MobileAware platform enables content, function and image consistency by catering to various devices. Our approach uses smart device detection, an extensive and up-to-date device repository, and automated content adaptation.
Device Detection
When a user accesses your mobile website, your system needs to be able to detect both the device and browser being used in order to offer the best possible mobile user experience. Without device detection, mobile web sites are forced to offer the lowest common presentation to ensure it worked on all devices. This ‘lowest common denominator’ approach sacrifices support for larger displays, advanced HTML tags, CSS animations and more. MobileAware has worked on device detection for many years and has refined a detection process that uses a combination of server-side HTTP request analysis and client-side JavaScript to determine precisely the device being used and its specific capabilities. We have the largest, most accurate device detection repository available on the market today.
Device Repository
Since 1999, MobileAware has created, maintained, and grown a massive Device Repository supporting over 10,000 devices, using an efficient representation with thousands of data nodes, each with hundreds of device attributes. Our vast data library is the basis for device-optimized Web experiences.
The repository includes profiling information for thousands of legacy and modern devices in use today. Each entry contains information to assist the device detection process, as well as hundreds of attributes defining specific characteristics that can be leveraged in adapting the mobile Web presentation, content and features. Example attributes include:
- Screen dimensions
- Browser markup availability
- Supported image types
- Hardware keyboard existence
- Touch-screen support
The device repository manager allows operators to review the devices and create custom attributes that can be used by the mobile website solution. The device repository is automatically managed for solutions launched in our managed services environment and can be manually or automatically updated from our servers in customer-deployed environments.
Content Adaptation
Content adaptation is required to take a single sourced solution and ensure it is properly represented for any given mobile device. At the lowest level, the MobileAware adaptation filter will transform the HTML markup into the appropriate markup required by the device browser (i.e. WML, XHTML MP, etc.). The filter will transform higher level markup elements that are not supported by the requesting browser into a set of markup resources that provide similar presentation, content size, and formatting. At a higher level, the MobileAware mobility framework contains a set of markup elements that represent common user experience patterns for mobile devices. These elements have built-in adaptability that leverages many of the profiled attributes provided by the device repository. This framework helps greatly reduce the time required to develop and test mobile Web site solutions, as it encapsulates best practices developed over the years by MobileAware.
Progressive Enhancement
By taking into account all the characteristics of each device, MobileAware can progressively enhance the experience for those users with the most up to date, technologically advanced devices. This means that operators and enterprises can be confident that customers will have access to the optimal experience their devices allow.
Graceful Degradation
An equally important issue is maximizing the capabilities of legacy and feature phones. MobileAware’s technology optimizes the experience for all devices, and if need be, gracefully degrades capabilities and characteristics of applications in order to ensure that all customers can enjoy the best mobile web experience their device offers.