ahand
commented
9 years ago Hi, James --
Thank you for bringing the Galaxy Tab user agent to my attention and for sharing the Stackoverflow thread. Did you notice that that thread is dated 4 years ago in 2011 (and '12)? And that the thread references Android Gingerbread (v2.3) primarily?
That thread is very much out of date.
It appears that since Android Honeycomb, at least, Samsung has been more disciplined with its useragent strings for its tablets. Look at this list of useragent strings found with a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3. Only 1 had an instance of "mobile" in it, and that was for an obsolete version of UC Browser, which later versions corrected:
http://www.webapps-online.com/online-tools/user-agent-strings/dv/brand125579/samsung-galaxy-tab-3
In general, we want to avoid device-specific detection sniffing in MobileESP. Device-specific tests slow things down and are very hard to maintain.
In fact, the current MobileESP codebase has a single device specific test for the old HTC Flyer 7" tablet, which will be removed in the next update. The Flyer is an obsolete device at this point and probably not used enough any longer to worry about.
As a result, I don't think it makes sense to accept the merge request for the special case detection for the old Galaxy Tab device running an obsolete version of Android from 4 years ago.
Thanks, Anthony
jamesmehorter
The previous advice from Google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/03/mo-better-to-also-detect-mobile-user.html Is incorrect now. Some Android tablets do include the word 'mobile' in their user agent string.
Galaxy Tab User Agent String: (Note the presence of the 'mobile' keyword.)
Some responses from the community: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5341637/how-do-detect-android-tablets-in-general-useragent
However, Galaxy was kind enough to add the device model number to the UA, 'SCH-I800' which we're able to test against.