Overview

As part of our ongoing work on DeviceAtlas we had been trying to find research on the areas of device detection and content adaptation. Unfortunately no such work appears to exist and so we decided to do this important work ourselves to get an accurate picture of the level of adoption of device detection across a whole spectrum of mobile web sites. We present the findings here .

Methodology

All sites were tested using Chris Pederick's User Agent Switcher for Firefox (http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/) and tested with user agents for Nokia N95 and Nokia 6230 (with domain cookies cleared between tests). Image resizing was the primary means of identifing adaptation but sites where only ads were resized were excluded from the results.

Findings

The primary finding of this research is that it is the world's top brands that are leading the way in terms of building the most sophisticated mobile sites. This does not really come as a surprise given the importance of brand and image to the world's top brands but what is interesting is that while smaller brands and SMB's are tailing behind they are not as far behind as you might expect. We see this as clear evidence that the speed of growth and mass adoption of the mobile web are being understood by everyone and therefore the smaller companies see the need not to fall too far behind the bigger brands as essential in creating a space for themselves on the mobile web.

Interbrand Top 100

First up we tested the mobile sites of the Interbrand Top 100 which are the undisputed biggest brands in the world. Here we find that of those who have mobile sites 40% do content adaptation.

Breaking this list down into the top and bottom 50 we see that of the companies ranked 1-50 the percentage doing content adaptation was 42%

Whilst among companies ranked 51-100 the rate was 38%

Top 1000 US Companies

Next up we looked at the Top 1000 US companies based on Brandweek's published list of Superbrands and found that for those with a mobile site 58% auto- detected the mobile device and redirected from the .com to the mobile site. In addition 30% of these sites did content adaptation based on the visiting device.

Small Business

Finally We took a random sampling of .mobi sites belonging to small businesses. Here we found that 13% did content adaptation. Whilst this number is lower than the leading brands it is still a significant percentage and shows that a significant number of small companies are willing to invest in mobile technology.

Summary

The results appear in line with expectations. Larger brands with the largest budgets are leading the way and the finer you slice the data the more this fact shines through so that as we look at more detail we see that the very top of the Interbrand 100 are nearing 50% adoption.