Testing web mobile pages

In an earlier post, I was telling you how to detect a mobile device on the server side so you will be able to serve the appropriate page. The next step after you implemented those pages will be to actually see your work.

If you have a mobile device everything is fine. Frankly I don’t like to directly use one, because only typing a web address can be a challenge. Just a while ago, I discovered the My Mobiler application, some kind of Remote Desktop or VNC. So you can use your Windows Mobile from the comfort of your own desktop mouse and keyboard.

But this still involves having an actual device.

If not, you can use an emulator. For iPhone a good choice is Safari web browser under Mac or Windows. It uses the same rendering engine (WebKit) and has very similar functionality.
For Android, the Android emulator in Android SDK is a very good choice. It has almost the entire functionality of an actual device.

Another way of testing mobile pages will be to rewrite the User-Agent HTTP header of your own browser. This will ensure that you will get redirected (if the website is properly behaving) to a mobile web page.
How to do this?
In Firefox you type in the address bar about:config and define a new preference (by right clicking and selecting New » String) with the name general.useragent.override and the value of your choice.
In Internet Explorer things are a little bit more complicated and involves some registry editing.
In the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent] key you have to define the (Default), Compatible, Version and Platform. The final user agent string will look like [(Default)] ([Compatible]; [Version]; [Platform]).
If you add some values in the registry key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\Post Platform] they will be added in the user agent string.

But the easiest method to do this is with a Firefox add-on: User Agent Switcher.

If you choose an user agent string from the WURFL database and then visit Google, Yahoo, YouTube etc you will see a different version than the one you are used to.

Last update: May 12th, 2010