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Simplifying Mobile TestingTwo major challenges abound in the mobile app world; flat-rate data and handset incompatibility. While roll-out flat-rate plans is slowly gathering speed across most of the world (go figure why the US will overtake the #2 position soon if European carriers don't get their act together), device incompatability is still the single-biggest problem of the mobile app hacker. Symbian (including incompatible S60 versions 1, 2, and 3), Brew, J2ME, Flash Lite; lots of fancy attempts to get at a more universal mobile app development stack. While newly relaunched DeviceAnywhere hasn't solved the compatibility issues, they have taken a formidable stab at providing an easy and cost-effective way to test across a wide number of devices. In short, they provide an online interface for testing different live phones across multiple networks (demo here).
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Comments: 8
Josh Bancroft [16 December 2006 05:49 PM]
And then there's Windows Mobile and Palm OS smartphone/PDA phone devices, which most of the time, aren't compatible with the J2ME apps anyway (there are exceptions).
Most people I know that want to run apps on their phones are using one of those, or a Blackberry, not the little feature phone that they got for free from their carrier.
Mobile compatibility is definitely a jungle...
Sriram Krishnan [MSFT] [16 December 2006 10:14 PM]
We at Microsoft are doing our part in helping out.
#begin plug
The feature I own is about integrating device testing with Visual Studio- so as a developer, you could get your app tested across tons of different devices (actual or emulated) from inside your IDE.
For folks who want to get started, check out http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdteam/archive/2006/11/12/unit-testing-for-net-compact-framework.aspx #end plug
Nikolaj [16 December 2006 11:50 PM]
Josh, while your observation may be true, I personally believe this is a question of demographics. If you look towards Europe and especially Asia, people happily spend $600 on phones. Teenagers aren't using Windows mobile but are the most spendthrift uers, phone apps included.
Nikolaj [17 December 2006 12:02 AM]
Sriram, thanks for pointing this out. This is obviously the most important first step. Microsoft is, despite limited success so-far, doing interesting work in creating mobile stack for the developer. Sorry for leaving you out in the original post!
Steven Veltema [18 December 2006 01:31 AM]
My company in Japan often makes use of testing rooms from time to time. There are rooms in Akihabara and otherplaces with all kinds of phones and you pay by the hour (per room/phone) to rent out the room to test your appli. They also can provide a tester if you have the need. I have a hard time believing that there aren't similar outfits in the Valley.
theodoremomoto [18 December 2006 07:12 AM]
That's great news to share.Thanks for Information
theodoremomoto [18 December 2006 07:13 AM]
That's great news to share.Thanks for Information
Michael Leahy [19 December 2006 12:02 AM]
Greets... It is great to see our tech mentioned on the Radar. I'm a software architect for Mobile Complete and Radar reader. I would like to mention the client for DeviceAnywhere and our enterprise offerings have been ported to Linux & OSX and will be available soon on these platforms in addition to Windows.