Test Your Site on Mobile Device Simulators

With the growing popularity of handheld devices, you should constantly be checking to see what mobile users are seeing when they look up your site. One way is to type the URL into your wireless device, but how do you test on devices you don’t have? Or what if you’re not a mobile user? Now you can use mobile device simulators on your computer to see what mobile users with different handheld devices are seeing.

For a quick and easy look, you can try the pocket device simulator from G-site. This site lets you type in any URL and see what mobile users might see. It displays the page in a generic handheld device.

For example, here’s a screen cap of yesterday’s Webgrrls Wisdom blog using G-site:

Sites like G-site meet many people’s needs. However, they don’t take host files and other local settings into account. To test your site on specific types of devices or to play with more advanced options, you might want to install applications from the different mobile device creators.

Microsoft allows you to download emulators that can be used with or without Visual Studio. Here’s a glance at the same Webgrrls blog post using the Microsoft Mobile Emulator:

BlackBerry also provides its own mobile simulators for BlackBerry devices for you to download, and the Palm Developer Network provides free access to mobile simulators for Palm devices as well.

You can no longer afford to hope for the best when it comes to mobile devices. You should find out what your customers are seeing and then seek out ways to make the user experience on mobile devices simpler and easier to use.

Related posts:

1. The Web’s Future: Peering into the Crystal Ball
2. 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
3. Beta Versions of Microsoft and Mozilla for Web Developers
4. Google gPhone
5. DHTML Color Picker tool for your website