Can js/jQuery determine the orientation of the iPhone?

Question

Out of curiosity I\'ve been playing with jQuery to determine the browser\'s screen size, and it occurred to me that screen size could be used to determine whether or not a v

Answer 1

jQuery(window).bind('orientationchange', function(e) {

  switch ( window.orientation ) {

    case 0:
        alert('portrait mode');
    break;

    case 90:
        alert('landscape mode screen turned to the left');
    break;

    case -90:
        alert('landscape mode screen turned to the right');
    break;

  }

});

edit:

While this is OK for the iPhone it may not work correctly in other devices.

I would like to add some info I found at http://phoboslab.org/log/2012/06/x-type-making-of

And his example is more cross browser/device compatible.

Mobile Safari and Chrome both support the orientationchange event, which makes this easy. However, we can not rely on window.orientation, which reports the rotation in degrees (0, 90, 180 or 270), because some devices report 0° for portrait mode, while others report 0° for landscape. How convenient!

The solution is to just check if the window height is bigger than the width – if so, we're obviously in portrait mode! But as this would be too easy, Chrome's Browser offers another challenge for us: it only updates the window dimensions after it has fired the orientationchange event. So we listen for orientationchange and resize events. Sigh.

var wasPortrait = -1;
var checkOrientation = function() {
    var isPortrait = (window.innerHeight > window.innerWidth);
    if( isPortrait === wasPortrait ) { return; // Nothing to do here }
    wasPortrait = isPortrait;

    // Do your stuff...
};
window.addEventListener( 'orientationchange', checkOrientation, false );
window.addEventListener( 'resize', checkOrientation, false );