Incorrect device information

[datapharm]

During our testing the following user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us; Silk/1.0.13.81_10003810) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16 Silk-Accelerated=true

is returning the device as being an Amazon Kindle Fire, with "is_wireless_device" being set to true. From a glance at the user agent string this is almost certainly incorrect. Putting this user agent string through your "Test Your Device" functionality on your homepage also bears this out to be a Kindle Fire Device.

Can you confirm whether this device detection is correct or not and if it isn't when it can be added to your database?

[sm_support2]

We have no evidence that this is something different from a Kindle Fire at the moment, even though it might be. Amazon has certainly made an aggressive move against content providers with the introduction of such ambiguous/generic UA strings.

As soon as the issue is clarified, we will do whatever we can to bring this sheep back to its flock. It may require an API upgrade though.

Thanks

[kamermans]

Hi,

The UA you posted is definitely a Kindle Fire using the built-in browser in desktop mode. The way we know this is that we have personally tested this device and confirmed it, and the Kindle File is currently the only device that uses the "Silk" browser, which was built by Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/ ... =200775440).

[datapharm]

The lesson to learn here is that it can't be assumed that the device is a Mac because a user agent string contains "(Macintosh; U; OS X 10_6_3..."!

Many thanks for your prompt reply and for clarifying this.

[kamermans]

Indeed, user agent strings can be very misleading!