We use two online services - www.perfectomobile.com and www.deviceanywhere.com. 
These are not emulators - in both cases you are remotely controlling real 
phones.
 
The theory is great but in practice both services are painful to use for all 
kinds of reasons including:
 
1. There is a significant delay between pressing a button and seeing anything 
change.
 
2. The display takes a while to update, which makes it difficult to control 
dynamic content and watch video.
 
3. Sometimes we could not work out how to interact with the phones. For 
instance one phone was locked and it took ten minutes to figure out the 
combination of keypresses (of unlabelled buttons) that was required to unlock 
it. If you are not already familiar with the phone you are controlling, this is 
a significant issue.
 
4. On several phones we were able to open a browser but could not work out how 
to enter a URL. The smartphones mostly support touch, so you can interact using 
a mouse, but you can't do that on the more basic phones. The support 
information is poor on both websites.
 
5. Security is a concern because we are often working under NDA for major 
brands on highly secret product releases. Perfecto Mobile simply say that 
anything you do might be seen by other people, so don't do anything you 
wouldn't want made public.
 
Device Anywhere claim that each session is private and that they have some sort 
of cleaning process before the next person uses the phone. However, on one 
occasion I could see everything that someone else was doing (in real time as 
they were doing it) and I could not control the phone. Somehow our sessions had 
got mixed up, which gave me no confidence in their security.
 
6. Overall it takes much longer to perform any given task - typically 3 to 10 
times longer than you could do the task using a desktop browser. Even typing 
URLs was taking a couple of minutes (they typically contained 50 characters or 
so), so we had to use a URL shortening service to speed that up.
 
Good luck and let us know if you find a better service.
 
Steve Green
Director
Test Partners Ltd


________________________________

From: [email protected] on behalf of Sean K
Sent: Sun 27/03/2011 00:28
To: [email protected]
Subject: [WSG] Mobile testing methods or emulators


Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone could give me an idea how to test sites for mobiles? 
I'd like to test Blackberry, HTC and IPhone and I was wondering what methods 
and or tools other people are using for this?

Thanks in advance.

Sean


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