Our friends over at iPhone Atlas have uncovered an interesting difference in the iPod Touch’s Safari user agent string—the code the Touch presents to webpages it’s browsing:

The version of Safari used by the iPod touch is ostensibly the same as the version used by the iPhone, but carries a slightly different user agent string.

iPod Touch user agent string Mozila/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A101a Safari/419.3
iPhone user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C28 Safari/419.3

Notice the different [sic] in device identifier and the different build number.

Unfortunately, this means that the iPod touch will not, currently, navigate immediately to the iPhone-optimized versions to which many sites automatically redirect — a temporary problem until site authors adjust for the change.

As they note, it’s unlikely that this will be a permanent problem, but it may have an impact on deployment of the iPod Touch at your college or university, and we thought you folks should know about it…