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Is there a way to detect if the device has as Retina display through WURFL?

Hi frodehansen,

For non-iOS devices, WURFL will provide both physical screen sizes and screen resolutions, where available, to help you determine the pixel density of the display. The relevant capabilities are:
physical_screen_width
physical_screen_height
resolution_width
resolution_height


For iOS, this becomes a bit more complicated since Apple has chosen to hide the underlying device's hardware information from the User-Agent. This means that we do not know if the iPhone running iOS6 is an iPhone 3GS or 4 or 4S or 5. So we err on the side of caution and provide capability values that represents the lowest specification among iPhones that run that version of the iOS. We are currently working on a solution for this issue and we may have a partial solution soon.

Cheers!

Thanks for your answer.

I hope you find a ok solution for the iOS issue.

Do you guys have any further updates on this topic? My Product folks are asking generally the same question here about how we can have the WURFL data accurately reflect the iPhone5 users. Any updates or ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.

Hi Eliotte, would you like us to contact you and discuss offline?

Sure - you guys should have my email address, let me know if not. How about you email me the contact information of who I should call (I'll probably call tomorrow, but possibly still today).

Hi,

Did you find a proper solution to detecting retina/ high display ratio devices?

anders

Hi Anders,

Unfortunately, there is not a reliable way to detect Retina devices at this time. Note that for other, non-Apple devices, you can always look at the resolution_width / physical_screen_width (in millimeters).

Hi,

I have been testing WURFL database with the following IPad user agents

IPAD_RETINA = "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5355d Safari/8536.25";
IPAD_1 = "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10";
IPAD_3 = "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; es-es) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B360 Safari/531.21.10";
private const string IPAD_MIN = "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A406 Safari/8536.25";

But it always return the same value for all them:
physical_screen_width = 148
resolution_width = 768

So i think this is wrong, also I'm trying to get those values in order to figure out if a Device is retina enabled or not, if there is a better way to do this please can you give me details.

Thanks
Robert

Please see the post directly above this one:

Unfortunately, there is not a reliable way to detect Retina devices at this time.

Furthermore, it is likely that there will never be a way to differentiate the hardware version of Apple devices using only the User-Agent string since Apple has gone to extreme lengths to hide this information.