Speaking of crappy User-Agent strings

I am normally a fan of Opera Mini and I use it quite often on my V640i, but yesterday we stumbled on a very wierd string.

A Samsung SGH-E740 (on Device Anywhere, so you can probably try it yourself) has Opera Mini installed and the User-Agent string is Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/1.1.7621/hifi/tmobile/uk; Motorola V3; en; U; ssr).

Now WHY is that “Motorola V3” string there? Surely this is not a Razr V3, surely Opera Mini aspires to be a better browser than the one pre-installed on the Razr V3, so WHY?

I don’t have a clue, of course.

PS: The X-OperaMini-Phone-Ua header is there and has the original User-Agent string.

3 thoughts on “Speaking of crappy User-Agent strings

  1. Hi Andrea.This is another example string we’ve seen:Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/1.1.3049/hifi/tmobile/uk; SonyEricsson W810i; en; U; ssr)It appears several service providers insert this piece — perhaps to provide some base/identifier for internal services as the Opera browser is generic across devices they manage.David Harper

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  2. That sounds like a pre-installed (in firmware)version of Opera Mini. A very old version at that. At least the UA contains “Opera Mini” 🙂

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  3. David, your point makes sense, but of course is way less than optimal. Why pre-install Opera Mini and then serve it a poorer experience?Dennis, I agree with you and in fact my colleague that was testing the device could not find any other browser. I think they installed Opera Mini and removed the native one (or keep it hidden somewhere).Go figure what’s on operators’ minds! 😉

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