Jan Standal

Emulating what exactly?

Thursday, 28. September 2006, 10:50:30

analysis, browser, browsers, convergence, dotmobi, mobile, opera, webdeveloper, devices

mTLD has published an emulator where you can

Test your web site to see if it’s ready for mobile customers.

They continue on their site saying

If you're not happy with what you see, - if you see anything at all – it's time to join the dotMobi Community by getting your .mobi domain name and optimizing your site for the mobile Internet.

The problem is that what their showing is not even close to what a user actual would see when visiting a web site with their phone. Especially is this the case when the site use media types to adapt the layout to the different screen resolutions. The screenshot on the right show this community site rendered in the emulator, while the one to the left show what it looks like in Opera 8.5 which is the web browser shipping on the Nokia N70.

Is there a point to dotmobi?Mobile AJAX Mythbusters?

Comments

tarquinwj # 15. October 2006, 09:26

On my own site, the emulator renders absolutely nothing. A completely blank page. My site is about as kind as it can be to mobiles; low bandwidth, easy design to reformat, media types for handhelds. It certainly does not need a wasteful duplicate version to allow mobiles to use it. They can all use the real site.

I have tested all of the current mobile browsers I could lay my hands on (and anyone who knows my site will know that I test on a huge number of browsers). Every single one of them displayed my site. Not all 100% perfectly due to their various bugs, but they all displayed something. And yet the emulator displays nothing.

The Nokia Series 40 WAP browser is considered old by today's standards. However, the emulator seems to pre-date the Series 40 browser. Its CSS support is worse than the Series 40 browser, and it has no scripting support, which the Series 40 browser does. The emulator uses a N70 skin, even though the N70 uses Series 60 2^nd ed FP3, which in reality has a better browser than the Series 40.

This .mobi emulator is not representitive in any way of current mobile browsers. Perhaps of the very early mobile WAP browsers, but we have moved past that now. Attempting to use something so unlike reality to persuade people to buy .mobi domains really does not strike me personally as a good approach.