Web Development: handheld device emulators

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In the past months I've made some researches about web development and design for handheld devices. The main problem, as we all know, is that we should have most of the devices sold, just to test how our web sites or applications are displayed on them. Does our newly created web site look just right on an iPad or a Galaxy Tab?

To be sure we are doing things properly, we need to test the web creation, and emulators can be of some help. In this post I gathered all the relevant tools, as a repository for future reference.


Android Emulator
"The Android SDK includes a mobile device emulator — a virtual mobile device that runs on your computer. The emulator lets you develop and test Android applications without using a physical device."

BlackBerry Simulator
"Use BlackBerry device simulators to demonstrate and test how the BlackBerry device software, screen, keyboard and trackwheel will work with your application. These simulators will also simulate behavior in various wireless network conditions. Device simulators are great tools for testing, training and for use in presentations."

iPad Peek
A simple, but effective, iPad emulator.

iphoney
"A free iPhone web simulator for designers."

Mobile emulator
This is one of the best emulators I have found. It can check for multiple cell phone terminal with different resolutions. Really helpful.

Phone emulator
"Emulate and compare your website across a variety of different phones. This is a one-stop mobile emulation shop! Compare how your site looks on three phones at a time, with the handset, browser and operating system (OS) specifications right beside the emulations. No need to download and install these mobile emulators – all the emulations are performed live online!"

Opera mini simulator
"Below is a live demo of Opera Mini 6.5 that functions as it would when installed on a handset."

Opera mobile emulator
"Do your mobile development straight from your desktop, and pair it with Opera Dragonfly for advanced debugging."

testiphone
"This is a web browser based simulator for quickly testing your iPhone web applications. This tool has been so far tested and working using Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 2 and Safari 3."

User agent switcher
"The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of a browser. The extension is available for Firefox and will run on any platform that this browser supports including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux."