No user agent detection for the iPad Mini

Often I feel like it would be better if sites couldn't even tell the difference at all between my phone and tablet and a normal browser... Some mobile sites are great, but only a very small minority. Most times I get redirected to a mobile site, I switch to the desktop version and find it's a far better browsing experience and they shouldn't have bothered in the first place...<p>An example of this is almost any blog with the WPTouch plugin... Most regular Wordpress theme gives you a better reading experience going to the desktop site and double tapping the main column to make it fill the screen!

The solution to this is to design for the iPad mini. If you make the user interface elements large enough to tap on a mini, they will also be large enough to tap on a full sized iPad. This also has the benefit of presenting a single user experience no matter what size iPad the user has, which I think is a plus.

<i>&#62; Don’t disable zoom ability in the viewport metatag, such as in user-scalable=no.</i><p>Please don't ever do this. It really sucks for reading your site on a touch tablet.

There is no user-agent detection between any models on iOS in Safari; it's not an oversight. You've never been able to detect a difference between iPad 1. 2, 3, 4 or 2(mini) or iPhone 3, 3GS, 4 and 5, nor should you. User agent detection is horrible and this isn't news.<p>Downloads over iTunesD show difference though; since you may want to serve them different payloads. "iTunes-iPad/5.1.1 (4; 16GB; dt:77)" vs. "iTunes-iPad-M/6.0.1 (2; 64GB; dt:75)"

Please, let's not get started all over again. UA detection is <i>dead</i>. Don't do it. Mobile Safari has a zoom-in feature (double-tap) that works perfectly without any "fixes" by the website developer.

Good. User-Agent detection has always been a hack.

All the comments so far have been with regards to modifying a site's appearance based on the device.<p>A totally separate use case is for business intelligence reporting. It's not <i>so</i> bad with the iPad 2 vs iPad Mini because they have virtually identical hardware other than the physical screen size (same CPU, memory, CPU, etc). However it's more important with, say, the iPad 3 vs iPad 4. Although both are fairly similar (both are branded as the "new iPad"), they do have different CPUs.<p>For our business, it is valuable to know which physical devices people are using, not just which OS or browser version they are on. Our product is one which heavily relies on the CPU performance - knowing which devices our customers are on tells us which devices we should prioritise the testing on. Yes, we may be able to optimise the product to work on an iPhone 3G (picked as an example of a lower end iPhone), but if the number of customers who use that device is low enough, then the business case won't stack up. When it comes to device testing, it seems only prudent to try and mimic the device profile of our customer base.<p>Also there are other, perhaps less tangible, use cases for understanding the device profile for our customer base. For instance, if iPad Minis are more popular for a particular demographic (perhaps rush-hour commuters), this may inform business decisions about development priorities, feature roll-out, or marketing campaigns.<p>In summary - please don't assume that the only reason for device detection is to change the appearance of a site; the data can be valuable in other ways too.

I think this is a case for continuing the current course. By that, I mean that these obvious missing issues of Apple would be fixed in the next revision if a large plurality of websites did not display well. I doubt the websites themselves would be affected in the long term, however. Of course, I base this behavior analysis on a sample of one (my apologies to the staticians out there).

Hmm<p>I'd argue detecting iPad 2 in landscape mode would be an opportunity for an extra RHS column<p>While on Mini, you'd just drop that<p>Shame we can not have that possibility, as the extra 19% of screen makes an extra column readable.

Give it a math problem to solve and find our how long it takes to solve it. It's a hack, but that is probably the best way to determine what iOS device it is.

This really only matters for pages designed to look "native", in which case as long as you don't have a tap area smaller than about 44x44 pixels (like Apple has always recommended) then you shouldn't really have a problem at all.<p>If it's a normal site then this shouldn't matter one bit because most people will be zooming into your pages anyway, unless you've disabled that (which you really shouldn't.)

After the ipad mini introduction video with Ive waxing on about how they redesigned it from scratch for the smaller form factor, it's irritatingly condescending that they report false results back to media queries to prevent designers from doing the same.

would it be possible to do it by using one of these two approaches after the first general iPad user agent check?<p>-using a full screen image and getting an useful parameter from that via javascript<p>-uploading a screenshot of a graphics element via javascript/canvas for a server to evaluate

They'll probably be able to patch this. Most likely it's a simple oversight

Thank you Apple! Good decision there. If your site needs special tweaks just because the screen is a mere 19% smaller then your design sucks. Just my opinion.