Is there a way to get the type of mobile phone when the phone connects to the mobi site using PHP?
You can read the user agent with PHP, and this can give you a clue.
http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/ <- Free function to read a read user agent with PHP.
Take a look at wurfl . It can match all 28000 different user agent headers with a specific mobile phone and give you its attributes (sreenwidht / screenheight / canplayvideo / etc)
, - HTTP- . $_SERVER ['HTTP_USER_AGENT']. http://php.about.com/od/learnphp/p/http_user_agent.htm
There is a working draft from W3C called the Simple Device Description API Device Description. There is DDR Service , a reference implementation that can work with WURFL, DeviceAtlas and UAProf under the hood.