Research Methodology for Adding New Device Models

How to find new tablet (or phone) models from a vendor and add them to Mobile-Detect.

Step 1 -- Identify new models

• Browse the vendor's website across regions to find new devices:
  • Samsung: samsung.com/us/tablets/, samsung.com/uk/tablets/, samsung.com/global/
  • Check both the main Catalog section and the Support section for model codes
• Use GSMArena (gsmarena.com) -- search for e.g. samsung galaxy tab and filter by announcement year. Each device page lists all SM-XXXX model variants (Wi-Fi, LTE, 5G, regional suffixes like N, B, F)
• Check SamMobile (sammobile.com) for Samsung-specific coverage
• Cross-reference with the existing regex in src/MobileDetect.php (search for SamsungTablet) and test fixtures in tests/providers/vendors/Samsung.php to identify what's missing

Step 2 -- Find User-Agent strings

• Search UA databases: user-agents.net, whatismybrowser.com, deviceatlas.com, udger.com
• Search for "SM-XXXX" user agent on the web
• Check Samsung's developer docs: https://developer.samsung.com/internet/user-agent-string-format.html
• If real UAs aren't available (device too new), construct them using the standard Chrome pattern:
  Copy

  Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android {version}; {model}) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/{version}.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
  

  Use the Android version the device ships with (from GSMArena specs) and a Chrome version contemporary to the device's release date.

Step 3 -- Add to codebase

• Add model numbers to the appropriate regex array in src/MobileDetect.php (e.g., $tabletDevices['SamsungTablet'])
• Add test fixture entries in tests/providers/vendors/{Vendor}.php
• Run vendor/bin/phpunit -v -c tests/phpunit.xml to verify

Samsung model number conventions

• SM-T### -- Standard Galaxy Tab series
• SM-X### -- Newer Galaxy Tab S / Tab A series (2022+)
• SM-P### -- Galaxy Tab with S Pen (Tab S6 Lite, etc.)
• Suffixes: no suffix = Wi-Fi, B = global 5G, N = Korean, U = US carrier, F = regional LTE variant

Note on User-Agent Reduction

Chrome 110+ began rolling out UA reduction, replacing the device model name with K. Samsung Browser v24+ also uses K. However, many devices and browsers still send the full model number. The library's detection depends on model-number matching, so we continue to add model patterns. Long-term, Client Hints (Sec-CH-UA-Model) support may be needed.