(Legacy Interface): Why am I seeing a high number of "Unknown Generic Windows Tablets" within the Mobile reports? What does this mean?

Answer

Starting December 3rd, 2013, the third party vendor that we work with started to recognize any Windows8+ IE useragent with the "Touch" property in the useragent as a Generic Windows Tablet. So you will see this listed under:

Digital Analytics > Reports > Mobile > Mobile Device | By Type > Tablet > unknown generic windows tablet

Previous to Dec 3rd, these user agents were not recognized as mobile devices.

Here is an example of user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0) like Gecko

The reason they are listed as "unknown generic" is because there is not enough information in the useragent string for our third party to determine the device model or manufacturer. The third party vendor has been communicating with Microsoft on this, and in summary it is not possible to know if a device with this Windows configuration is a tablet or desktop, since the UA is the same.

The change made to recognise the device to unknown was because there are now different tablet vendors all with the same UA, due to their usage of Windows

This may change in the future as we are bringing up recommendations to our third party to provide better data for these devices.