The weather outside may be a typically damp British April - but here at 51Degrees.mobi there’s not a cloud in the sky. We’ve developed a mobile device detection solution that doesn’t rely on a ‘cloud’ connection every time there’s a new visitor to your mobile web site.

As far as we’re concerned, cloud services are very well-suited to location-based services and other applications that require vast quantities of data. They’re also often a practical solution when information needs to be shared but needs to be controlled or monitored as well.

However, mobile device detection is a completely different type of situation.

If you don’t have a web site designed for mobile phones, you don’t just risk frustrating your customers when they visit you online. You’re also likely to drain their smartphone batteries. That’s the message from a research team based at California’s Stanford University.

The researchers published a paper entitled “Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption” at the World Wide Web 2012 conference last week. They used an Android handset to browse a variety of popular web sites, measuring the phone’s energy consumption as it loaded and rendered web pages. As well as analysing each page, the team also measured the energy needed to render individual web elements such as images, JavaScript, and CSS.

Enabling your website for mobile visitors doesn’t just improve the consumer experience. It also makes commercial sense.

The latest organisation to produce figures that prove what we’ve known for a long time is UK-based search marketing agency Mediarun. It’s found that ‘bounce rates’ from mobile devices are around 40%, which is about 10% higher than on desktop browsers. The company says this means 5.6% of all mobile traffic is being lost by online retailers... and that’s a significant amount of lost sales.

51Degrees.mobi has become the first device detection business to implement Ringmark in its free-for-commercial-use and paid-for premium data sets. This ground-breaking move makes it easier for developers to create mobile web sites that are tailored to the precise needs of online visitors.

Ringmark is the mobile browser test process introduced at Mobile World Congress 2012 by Facebook. It’s designed to help developers learn more about each mobile web visitor without requiring visitors to provide any personal details. Coremob, the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is eventually expected to be handed control of the project.

51Degrees.mobi, the leading provider of device detection and web optimisation solutions, has announced a breakthrough in mobile device detection.

By using the built-in accelerometers on modern smartphones, together with the CPU temperature monitoring that’s standard on most mobile devices, 51Degrees.mobi can now determine whether a mobile phone is being held in a user’s left hand or right hand.