Test Your Site with Online Emulators

Below is a list of several online mobile device emulators. Most of these emulators can be used (some easier than others) to test how your mobile compliant website will look on different mobile devices. They allow the input of url's (sometimes thru search boxes) which then render your pages inside the emulated device. Are these emulators perfect? No, but they are a good way to get a basic idea of what works and what doesn't for your website.

We also use these emulators to see how they work with our MobileSiteOS™ software. Because they output 'user agent strings' like those of the devices they emulate, we can see how our WURFL to Perl data and scripts work for these devices. This saves having to "own" or have access to the real mobile device for simple testing.

Some emulators work better than others. The Opera and dotMobi emulators work great. The Opera emulator is more generic since it is a 'demo' of the Opera Mini browser. The Yospace emulator can be made to work, but requires using the 'web search' on it's start page. Use 'opensitemobile' as the search term and then navigate to our MobileSiteOS™ Basic demo's. Yahoo's emulator works, but won't render the script driven examples (don't know why?). Also, the Orange site (and maybe others) use Yospace emulator code, so the experience is the same but with different phone configurations.