What about UAProf? by Luca Passani The problem that the WURFL tries to help with is very clear to third party companies who see a business model (and rightly so) and the OMA. As far as companies go, I won't name any (unless you are the boss of one of these companies and you would like to be mentioned here. In this case, let us know). As far as the WAPForum/OMA goes, there is a fully-fledged spec that gives us hope that things may change in the future. The spec is called UAProf and can be found here (oops, all of a sudden the link has become password protected. If you have an alternative link, please let us know): http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/affiliates/wap/wap-248-uaprof-20011020-a.pdf As it is, UAProf has several shortcomings. On the other side, UAprof is a great way for us WURFL to get a lot of info about unreleased devices (or devices which we haven't had a chance to put our hands on). As far as shortcomings go, here are a few: UAProf seems to rely too much on someone else's setting up the infrastructure to request profiles. This does not happen. You still need expensive 'black boxes' to use UAprof in practice There is no guarantee that the info in UAProf are accurate. There are cases of manufacturers just associating the profile of a different phones into a new one. To add to that, there are plain errors.(ok, that's the same for the WURFL, but the WURFL gives you a chance to fix errors right away and tell everyone about it so we can fix it) WURFL lets us model any feature or capability of whatever phone, no matter what the phone manufacturer does or say. You are not limited to the properties in UAProf. The WURFL can be installed at your site and does not need to grab device profiles off a repository on the net. This is a huge advantage Last, but not least, WURFL is about developers cooperating, while UAProf has little or no developer community behind it. The process we follow today for many new devices, is to import the basic data (screen size, supported media types) from the UAprof and into the WURFL. As we find out about differencies, we manually fix that in the WURFL. In practice, UAProf becomes the lower limit to the quality of WURFL.

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