Non Hover Event in Touch Screen Devices
I came across an article on non hover events for touch screen devices and dropped the below in as a comment.
It's an interesting topic and one that will begin to become more and more important as the touch screen world evolves.
The sales figures are definitely pointing towards the need to do something now.
376 Million touch-screen phones being sold in 2009 is nothing to balk at :)
Having said that though what are the actual usage statistics? I had a quick whip around the interweb in search of such data but have come back fairly empty handed in terms of real statistics, but quite a few ways to detect such devices.
I agree that we should be designing interfaces that are accessible across all mediums, but we need to be able to cater for each of these with some relative ease.
Here, http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html, is a list of user strings for most of the current mobile phones, and over here http://www.hand-interactive.com/resources/detect-mobile-php.htm we have a break down of iphone/windows/symbian/blackberry etc etc.
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ offers an XML file of available mobile devices and a very detailed review of their capabilities.
MobileESP is available from the code base on google, http://code.google.com/p/mobileesp/, which appears to be quite helpful, but also goes on to say it’s not a replacement for WURFL or Hand Interactive.
Hand Interactive uses PHP to identify what device you have such as the iPhone/iPod Touch, Symbian S60 or BlackBerry – http://www.hand-interactive.com/resources/detect-mobile-php.htm
Does anyone use other ways to touch/smart phone detection? Is it possible to identify if a device offers touch capabilities as part of the user agent string rather than comparing it to another list?
Author: Justin Avery
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