There have been quite a few questions on the Developers Group about the types of mobile phones supported by Blueprint for Mobile Sites. In this post we like to give you the current status as well insights into our roadmap.

With Blueprint for Mobile Sites you can easily create mobile web sites from Blueprint mark-up that look great and are optimized to work on a wide range of mobile devices and browsers. As this is a very time consuming process we’ve started with the higher-end devices and the current release of Blueprint supports about 300 devices. This covers the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the newer Nokia Series 60 devices, Windows Mobile devices and the latest Blackberrys.

In addition the mobile site can be viewed on all devices that support the Opera Mini browser. If we can’t display your site on a phone, we will prompt the user to install it.

When we take your Blueprint XML we want to ensure that it looks great on the several thousand devices we are targeting. You can imagine how many adjustments, how much QA and in the end how much time this process actually needs to take. Don’t think only about the screen size, think HTML support (and mark-up bugs), memory limits per page, maximum content sizes a device can handle and limited support for images.

The majority of the traffic in the mobile web comes from higher-end devices, most of which are supported today, but we understand that you (and we) want more – particularly outside North America. Therefore we are excited to let you know that we are in the final phases of rolling out dramatic increases in the number of supported devices as we extend our coverage to include older phones. We expect that by June your Blueprint sites will be rendered on more than 4000 devices and we will post an update once the release is available.

Thank you for your ongoing support and with your feedback we can make this platform even better.