how to identify if user agent is windows 8 tablet?

javascript windows-8 device-detection
hrishikeshp19 picture hrishikeshp19 · Jan 9, 2013 · Viewed 12.8k times · Source

I have a web application. I my JavaScript, I am identifying devices by user agent string as follows:

_android = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("android");

_iOS = navigator.platform.indexOf("iPhone");

My task is to identify if device is win8 tablet or not?

I have already seen this post. But, the string "Windows NT" is likely to appear in useragent on all the PC browsers. So, I need to find out a client side way of identifying if device is win8 tablet?

Any thoughts?

Answer

Dominic Hopton picture Dominic Hopton · Jan 9, 2013

You can't identify if it is a tablet or not, but you can identify if it has touch or not. This is the IE user agent here:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/6.0; Touch)

The touch at the end is only present if touch is.

However, if you are just trying to identify touch capabilities, you should use feature detection rather than user agent sniffing.

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