1

Great overview of the mobile landscape. Testing for mobile is a rather tricky task and it’s nice to have a little bit of a roadmap.

If anyone hasn’t listened to it yet, I would highly recommend John Resig’s talk on the subject, given at Web Directions. http://www.webdirections.org/resources/john-resig-testing-mobile-javascript

I’d also like to second PPK’s recommendation of the mobile web mailing list. It’s very active and filled with lots of good discussion – a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the mobile web.

posted at 11:46 am on December 14, 2010 by Tim Kadlec

2 Two grand worth of kit...

… to test my sites on mobile? Better start increasing my rates for anyone who wants a mobile tested site.

Not to mention that this is an unaffordable sum for many many web developers all over the world. Which will result in many many sites all over the world not being tested for mobile.

What happened to the web being inclusive?

posted at 11:49 am on December 14, 2010 by Robin Massart

3 There must be a better way

This is a very informative article, but by the end it pretty much wants to make me walk away from the web and go into pottery.

Testing on as many devices as possible is a great idea in theory, but in practice it is untenable. Even if we buy a few devices to try to cover more ground, they will be outdated in just a few months or a year at most. So are we supposed to buy multiple devices per year? (I don’t even like buying one new device regularly, to keep up with my personal smartphone habit)

I certainly agree with the author that testing in the top few browsers is important for anyone and everyone. But the mobile space is, simply put, still the Wild West: platforms and devices come and go rapidly, and there are only a few that will prevail, and we already know what they are: Safari and other variants of WebKit on iOS, Android, and Blackberry. And Windows (because evil will always exist in this imperfect world).

I wonder if there isn’t a better way to drive more mobile standardization by purposefully ignoring some of the smaller platforms and devices? As designers, we can help shape the landscape in this way. Platforms and devices have no value if there is no content for them. Trying to do good work for as many platforms as possible is a charitable and happy thought, but the good is the enemy of the great.

Perhaps we should focus on doing greater work for fewer platforms?

posted at 01:32 pm on December 14, 2010 by klayon

4 Test Bed

Surely there must be some emulators out there for testing the different mobiles? A quick search on Google yielded this:

http://mobiforge.com/emulators/page/mobile-emulators

Does anyone have any direct experience with emulators who could give a recommendation?

posted at 01:55 pm on December 14, 2010 by IrishChieftain

6 Mobile Testing Suite

I just recently acquired a bunch of devices for testing; most of them I purchased used off Ebay and Kijiji and the total cost was only around $1600 CAD. Though, I’m missing a few critical devices like BB OS 6 and WP7 just because they were too new and out of my budget.

My biggest concern while choosing the devices was continued cost. I’m a little worried, like klayon, above, about having to get new devices every year. But I was also worried about the continued cost of just having these devices, so I specifically chose devices with WiFi so I wouldn’t have to pay for phone plans.

The iOS version share is around 50% iOS 4 and 50% iOS 3, is it worth investing in an older iOS 3 device?

I don’t want to seem like a troll, but if any one is interested, I wrote a blog post on what devices I chose: http://thomasjbradley.ca/blog/mobile-testing-suite

posted at 02:17 pm on December 14, 2010 by thomasjbradley

7 Netfront

It hurt me how Netfront was tossed away with an “ignore it”.
I happen to live in Japan and the Japanese market, most of it, is Netfront and nothing else. And considering that the japanese mostly use only their phone as a way to access the internet, Netfront cannot be ignored.
Could be for you, but not here.

posted at 03:30 pm on December 14, 2010 by valerauko

8 But wait there's more!

Great overview of the treacherous mobile landscape. It really enforces the fact that mobile can feel daunting.

Although I can’t really say I agree with going out and buying a fistful of devices in order to successfully optimize your site for mobile. Where do you even begin once you have your armory in hand? How do you manage all the little quirks in each OS/Browser and beyond that each version therein? Why neglect legacy devices?

On top of that the cost of devices alone is enough to make anyone cringe. Don’t forget to take into account the turn around time and lifecycle of the devices. Sure they are important now, but with an industry growing as fast as mobile you’ll miss an update if you blink. I’m getting motion sick just thinking about it — quick someone hold my hair.

Thankfully, I’m shameless and don’t mind plugging Mobify.

None of us sleep very much and browser quirks are what we give each other for our birthdays, which means we’ve spent all our time dissecting this daunting landscape and removing most of the worrisome complexity that comes with taking a site mobile across all platforms/devices, allowing designers/developers/publishers and anyone who wants a sexy mobile site to make one easily and without thoughts of suicide.

So, before you arrange any shady back alley transactions on craigslist, give us a shot.

posted at 05:31 pm on December 14, 2010 by Nick@Mobify

9 Testing on Opera Mobile and Opera Mini

To test for Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, there are emulators, it reduces a bit the test effort. It doesn’t solve everything.
http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/

There is also Dragonfly, a Web developer tool for tool, usable for remotely debugging a Web page on a mobile device from your desktop machine.
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/remote-debugging-with-opera-dragonfly/

posted at 05:59 pm on December 14, 2010 by karlcow

10 Javascript lib support

Both programmatic & declarative Javascript libraries have constantly increasing browser support – check back regularly for actual expectations on Sencha, jQTouch, jQuery Mobile etc

But the fact of the matter is that rich mobile web apps (/HTML5/CSS3/etc) work very well on contemporary WebKit, and can easily struggle elsewhere – so I think this stance is relatively unashamed, but future-worthy in the long run.

posted at 06:44 pm on December 14, 2010 by James Pearce