Detect phone/tablet/web client using javascript

Question

I am trying to detect if the end user is on a phone, a tablet or a pc

I have been Googling for a while, apparently there are no easy solution.

Well I guess I

Answer 1

User Agents are pretty unreliable, and can actually be faked by clients. I would recommend to focus on specific functionality instead of specific devices. Modernizer is a library that can be used to detect if features are available on the client device. This will allow you to detect if things like local storage, etc are available. If you are interested in something like Responsive Web Design instead of device/client specific features, you could use a library like Twitter's Bootstrap. At the bottom of the Scaffolding page, it even has some features that enable detection of phone vs. tablet vs. desktop, although I believe that it is based on resolution.

--Edit to add--

I would also like to emphasize that you should ask yourself why you actually care what device the user is on. It will be much easier to detect the specific feature you care about than it will be to detect all features that are available.