Detecting IE Mobile

From the IE Mobile Team Weblog at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/iemobile/archive/2006/08/03/Detecting_IE_Mobile.aspx

“For Windows Mobile 5.0, the “current” release, the User-Agent header that the browser sends across is one of the following two strings:

• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240×320)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176×220)

Moving forward, here’s the new IE Mobile User-Agent string:

• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile m.n)

If you want to detect the current/older IE Mobile browsers, the way to do it is to look for “PPC” or “Smartphone“, as well as “Windows CE” in that string.  That’s the only sure-fire way to be certain of what you’re getting.

If you want to detect the new browsers coming out, just look for the string “IEMobile” as part of the User-Agent header.  Since the capabilities of the Pocket PC and Smartphone versions of the browser are identical, and they’re built from the identical code base, there’s no reason to differentiate them any more. “

Ajax on Windows Mobile

Interesting article: http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/mobiledeveloper/programmingwithinternetexplorermobileandajax/

“Ajax is a design model that has the aim of making web sites that are close to applications in terms of responsiveness and usability. Ajax applications are very suited to mobile devices, as they are lightweight, do not require any code to be installed on the device itself, and can be accessed remotely using the built-in (Internet Explorer Mobile) client that’s present on every device.”