Mobile Device Detection refers to software that identifies the type of mobile device

Mobile phone

A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

 visiting a web site and either redirects the end user to a dedicated mobile web site or adapts the format of the web site to suit the end user’s device.

Background

Most desktop web browsers use HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 and display a relatively consistent web page regardless of the browser type or computer manufacturer.

However, mobile browsers may use HTML, WML

Wireless Markup Language

Wireless Markup Language , based on XML, is a markup language intended for devices that implement the Wireless Application Protocol specification, such as mobile phones. It provides navigational support, data input, hyperlinks, text and image presentation, and forms, much like HTML...

 (WAP

Wireless Application Protocol

Wireless Application Protocol is a technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network.A WAP browser is a web browser for mobile devices such as mobile phones that uses the protocol.Before the introduction of WAP, mobile service providers had limited opportunities to offer...

) or a number of other markup languages

Markup language

A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...

. In addition, there is a much wider diversity in screen sizes, browser types and operating systems than with desktop computers.

As a result, a web site solely designed for the larger screen of a desktop computer is often unlikely to appear correctly or legibly when viewed on the smaller display of a mobile phone.

Solution

Any internet-connected device that ‘requests’ a web page via its browser will identify itself with a User agent

User agent

In computing, a user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system...

 code. Determining the type of browser or device from the User Agent offers a web developer the opportunity to encode a web page so that it behaves appropriately for each web visitor.

Mobile Device Detection combines a list of User Agent data – sometimes referred to as a Device Description Repository

Device Description Repository

The Device Description Repository is a concept proposed by the Mobile Web Initiative Device Description Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium. The DDR is supported by a standard interface and an initial core vocabulary of device properties...

 (DDR) – with a software solution (API

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

) to access the User Agent list.

Device Detection providers

• DetectMobileBrowsers.mobi
• DetectRight
• DeviceAtlas
• 51Degrees.mobi
• OpenDDR
• ScientiaMobile
• WURFL
  Wurfl
  WURFL stands for Wireless Universal Resource FiLe. It is a community effort focused on mobile device detection: the problem of presenting content on the wide variety of wireless devices. WURFL is a set of proprietary API's and an XML configuration file which contains information about device...
  
  
• Apache Mobile Filter
  Apache Mobile Filter
  Apache Mobile Filter or AMF, is an open source project created by Idel Fuschini and distributed under the GNU General Public License...