Tira Wireless will announce public versions of its handset device database tomorrow, starting with 1,257 devices from 54 manufacturers, officials said.

Called modd – mobile open device database – and spelled in lowercase, Tira will offer a free version and two commercial versions, said Simon Keogh, VP of product management.

The company started in 2001 to develop mobile games.  A few years later, “We began to focus our attention a little bit more than on addressing the challenges of mobile content,” Keogh said.  Tira refocused on testing and porting services for other developers.  “One of the things that we had been constantly fearing is that they need information about specific device attributes,” he explained.

With the new modd service, the free version is available now in beta form, and users can perform simple searches.  The standard edition costs $10,000 per year.  It’s a downloadable program, allows any form of database query and users get an export feature.  The enterprise edition has various license fees, includes programming interfaces and offers options for letting  customers republish data.

Meanwhile, “Our definition of ‘open’ is that we are going to be enabling application developers to profile handsets that they have and to get the data sent back to them,” Keogh explained.  That works by installing a Tira program on a handset that’s not in the database. The program sends a signal back to the Tira software, which analyzing the device attributes, and the data is saved for future tests.

Future versions may include data related to market share and mobile operating systems.  That could be useful, for example, when a content developer needs to decide which devices and OS versions to write for first.