With smartphones becoming an integral part of our lifestyle, accessing websites on mobile devices makes for a large section of the overall viewership of a website. Therefore, it is imperative that usability factor of your website for mobile users be tested and secured when it comes to website development.
One of the basics of ensuring a mobile-friendly website is to test it on different smartphone platforms (like iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, etc.). And to do so, the importance of mobile phone emulators has to be considered in priority when designing a mobile-compatible website. So, what does a mobile phone emulator actually do?
- Allows you to check the responsiveness and functionality of the mobile websites across different mobile platforms
- Helps you identify the problems and issues concerning the website and lets you take corrective measures to make the website visually appealing and functional on mobile devices.
- Simplifies the process of website testing and does away with the technique of testing the website on different devices.
Here we make a brief analysis of a few of the prominent mobile phone emulators available:
This is one of the most popular mobile emulators used extensively for checking the compatibility of a website on the iPhone. All you require to do is enter the URL of your website into the address bar provided, and click <Load> or press enter on your keyboard to get a real-time preview of how it would appear on an iPhone. It also comes with additional functions like a + (plus) button to bookmark this site; and a ‘window’ button which allows you to flip (i.e. rotate or change the landscape) of the iPhone to facilitate testing of website at different screen dimensions.
2. iPhoney
iPhoney is another innovative tool which not only checks the compatibility of your website on iPhone, but allows you to create iPhone compatible websites as well. Designed to allow web developers create 320 by 480 iPhone compatible websites, iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment (powered by Safari); besides allowing you to simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.
This is undoubtedly, one of the most popular mobile emulators that are being used by the most number of developers. The greatest advantage of this tool is that it allows you to test the compatibility of your website across a large number of mobile platforms including Android, iOS, BlackBerry, etc. All credit to its innovative device recognition system that allows you to build pages, which can be adapted to any mobile device so as to deliver the best user experience always.
4. iPad Peek
iPad Peek, a popular mobile emulator customized for the iPad allows you to check the compatibility of your website on the iOS tablet device. Besides that iPad Peek also allows web developers to replicate the appearance and functionality of their website on an iPad; and its free.
5. Gomez
Gomez is one of the intelligent mobile emulators that not only allows you to check the compatibility of a website on mobile devices, but also lets you judge its potential by offering a rating. Gomez helps you check the mobile readiness of your website with a rating between 1 and 5 based on 30 different parameters including media queries, caching techniques, style sheet use, etc.
Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile web browsers with over 120 million smartphones sold with a pre-installed Opera. Therefore, it is imperative you to test the Opera Mini compatibility of your website using Opera Mini Simulator – a free web-based emulator for testing and evaluating your web design on a mobile device. However, it should be noted that this tool requires the Java browser plugin to function.
7. Responsivepx
This innovative tool allows you to check the responsiveness/ adaptability of a website design and its compatibility to a mobile device. With Responsivepx mobile phone emulator, you can choose between multiple screen sizes and check the appearance and functionality of a website across an array of devices.
8. MobiReady
MobiReady allows you test the website along different parameters including Page Test, Markup Test and Site Test after entering the URL of your website. Besides having a comprehensive code checker, MobiReady lets you check many other parameters such as dotMobi compliance and W3C mobile compliance – offering detailed error reports.
9. Screenfly
This mobile emulator comes with one of the best preview tools, which allow you to see how the website would be rendered by mobile devices across diverse platforms. Screenfly is a must-have mobile emulation tool considering its wide coverage of platforms; and also because it allows you to customize it in a way you would like your website under different categories.
10. ProtoFluid
PlotoFluid is an innovative mobile emulator with a fantastic UI that allows you to test different resolutions to cover some of the less common devices. However, unlike of the mobile emulators that are available free; you require to purchase a £5 license for ProtoFluid if you want to use it more than 10 times.
So, which is your kind of mobile emulator? If you are using any other innovative tool to test your website on mobile device, do share with us.
