Mobile Emulators
What is an Emulator?
An emulator is a software program that aims
to replicate the functions of a specific piece of hardware or software.
What are Mobile
Emulators?
Getting any mobile application Tested on
various devices when they are not available has always been a great
problem for developers .Even after porting your application on various devices,
it is very important to get it tested for overall success of that application.
But
the real problem is how many devices you can buy since numbers of devices are
too large. That’s why we use Emulators. Emulators can be used instead to allow
you to simulate testing on the real device. The benefits of using
Mobile Emulators are:
- No data browsing charges are incurred, as all browsing is performed via your standard Web connection
- Quicker access to devices – starting an emulator is faster than switching SIM cards and rebooting devices
- Provides access to a potentially large number of devices/browsers – the number of devices you can use is only limited by hard disk space and the number of emulators you can find
- Inexpensive – many emulators are available for free
Types of Mobile Emulator:
Mobile emulators fall into three main categories:- Device emulators - These are generally provided by device manufacturers and simulate the actual device. Device emulators are excellent for testing your site or application on a particular device or set of devices.
- Browser emulators - These simulate mobile browser environments. Useful for determining the functionality available in a particular mobile browser, they are useless for device-specific testing.
- Operating System Emulators - Microsoft provides emulators for Windows Mobile, and Google provides an emulator for Android. These run within a simulated mobile device environment and provide access to applications running within the operating system, e.g. a Web browser.
Popular Emulators:
The following companies offer emulators for some or all of their mobile devices:- Research in Motion (Blackberry)
- Apple (iPhone)
- Palm
- Microsoft (Windows Mobile)
- Google (Android)
- Nokia (Series 40 and Series 60)
- Opera Mini
- Open wave
Web-based Emulators
Web-based emulators are easy and quick to access – no installation, just enter the correct URL and start testing.Apple (iPhone) Emulators
A full iPhone emulator is included as part of the iPhone SDK. To obtain this, register with Apple as a developer.Fortunately, there’s a FREE iPhone simulator available on the Web. It can be found at testiphone.com.
This provides a nice, quick way of testing your Web sites on a simulated iPhone. Just type in the URL of the site you want to test and hit ENTER.
Palm Emulators
Introduction and Downloading
Palm is making a big splash in the mobile world with its upcoming Pre. A Palm Pre emulator can be downloaded from the Palm developer site as part of the Mojo SDK. You need to register to download the SDK, which is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is reliant on Java 6 and Virtual Box (Sun’s virtual machine software) being installed, links to both of which are provided on the download page. Again, be aware of the download size – Virtual Box is over 60MB and the Mojo SDK is around 176MB.Installing and Running
Once you’ve downloaded everything, and made sure Java and Virtual Box are installed, you can install the Mojo SDK. Doing this is a snap; just click Next a couple of times. After installation is complete, a Palm folder will appear in your Start Menu. Click on this, then on SDK. You’ll see a Palm Emulator menu item. Click on this and the emulator will load (it runs as a VirtualBox virtual machine – you may receive a firewall warning):
Palm Pre emulator
Palm Pre emulator displaying web page
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