I knew this day would come, did not expect it that fast and certainly not because of a flaw.
Browsers on mobile are becoming more and more powerful and a direct consequence is that making a difference between them and a desktop browser seems to be less and less useful (even though it will “always” make sense). I am surprised it comes that early, and even more it comes because of a flaw from Nokia engineers: I realised recently that mobile browsers embedded in some recent Nokia’s phone identified themself in the user-agent string as
“Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”
ie. as a desktop browser. This is actually how the Open Source browser from Nokia identified itself and this browser is currently shipped on some Series 60 3rd edition and Series 90 phones.

That means you can not detect the request comes from a mobile device, you can not find out device properties with tool like WURFL,… Other mechanism have to be implemented to give access to a mobile version of a website (like the “social” mechanism, ie go on xxx/mobile)

More on that later…

Follow the thread of discussion on Yahoo! Group.