Well this is pretty exciting news for those of us who are enthused by the device variety out there and the opportunity that gives us to create real personally optimised mobile experiences. .mobi have released their DeviceAtlas mobile device database for all and sundry to use. Go on – register for free and have a quick browse around.
Even though the device navigation could do with a little bit of tidy up, it’s a nice clean web AJAXy UI and very promising for what will come beyond v1. I really like that it’s recording the source of the information and highlighting when their is a conflict between two sources. Take a look at the iPhone entry to see some conflicts between what WURFL thinks it is and what .mobi device team think it is. I spotted a few other points, e.g. the SE T610, where conflicts between the UA Prof and WURFL were identified – as we know the UA Prof value isn’t always to be trusted. This’ll really help with quality control and give you a level of confidence of accuracy. It does beg in my mind the relationship between WURFL and .mobi on this, as Luca Passani announced a month or so ago that the WURFL DB web-based interface was released and took great pride in inviting knowledgeable sources to join in with the maintenance of the WURFL DB. If anyone can comment on the .mobi / WURFL relationship then please do.
It also ties in well with Volantis heading towards open source, with the Volantis Database letting the “Users of the Community edition have open access to a key subset of data”. I can’t comment on which device database is the most accurate or most complete, but I’d guess that .mobi will have picked up quite a bit of momentum at this point. I’ll have to wait until I get some real hands on experience of DeviceAtlas to make a further judgement.
APIs look nice an simple. Take your pick of language – Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby or Python. Device DB provided using JSON. Licensing model seems reasonably well priced – $299/server/year (daily updates), $149/server/year (weekly updates), $99/server/year (monthly updates) and god bless ‘em developer license is free.
The devil will be in the detail – but I look forward to get my hands into it.
Thanks Ian. You’re right it’s only v1.0… we have lots to come!
As for the realtionship between WURFL and DeviceAtlas, we are very supportive of the work that Luca and team have done. Andrea joined dotMobi because we felt there was more we could do by bringing in data from other sources (Volantis, Argogroup, Nokia, Ericsson, TIM, etc etc) – something that’s not neccesarily easy in an open-source context.
But we also source data from WURFL too, so it’s all fairly symbiotic
Thanks again.