I’ve been playing around with a HTC Sensation for a few days, and so far it seems like a great phone, if only i could get used to typing on a touch screen only

But one thing i noticed is that you don’t get the mobile versions of most web pages. It seems HTC has decided to “camouflage” the Sensation as a desktop device (Safari running on an Intel Mac, no less) in order to avoid being detected as a mobile device on most sites and thus getting stripped down mobile versions of pages.

Example user-agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; HTC_Sensation_Z710e; en-no) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16

Notice how “Android” is totally absent — but at least the device name is there, so it’s possible to check for this if you target the exact device name. And then you have to update your database/code for all future HTC devices…

The problem with this is that it also breaks device detection for sites and apps that are adapted for newer smartphones with high resolution screens. Most new mobile sites are probably tuned for newer iPhones and hopefully android devices anyway.

This is also breaking the guide lines for User-Agent strings on Android devices. As the Android browser team says, this should not be done even for tablets and other large screen devices, but HTC apparently decided not to care about that.

At least HTC made this behavior configurable, but it is the default. In can be turned off in the browser:
menu –> more… –> settings –> mobile view

Enable this and the User-Agent is more familiar:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.3; en-no; HTC_Sensation_Z710e Build/GRI40) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

Apparently this is also the case for some other new HTC devices. Maybe it’s a nice feature to be able to view the full desktop versions of web pages, but i still think this should be an opt-in, not the default.

Now if only i could remove most of that Sense stuff….