If you get paralyzed by having too many choices, DeviceAnywhere will make you break out in a cold sweat.
On the other hand, if you’re a designer trying to figure out if your site will work on a Blackberry 8350i on Sprint in Kankakee, a Samsung SGH-F250L on Brazil’s VIVO carrier network AND a Sony K550im on France’s Bouygues network, then DeviceAnywhere is a dream come true.
Playing with all the various devices they have is addicting.
DeviceAnywhere maintains a network of mobile devices on racks with trickle charges of electricity feeding into them, just waiting for you to check them out. You can use them to access your mobile web page to see how it looks on the device — the screen actually is a pixel-for-pixel output from the video output on the device, not a camera pointed at the device’s display. Makes geting a decent screenshot of a mobile site a helluva lot easier, I can tell ya.
So far, you can only test about 30 phones in Brazil, but they are adding more all the time.
You can also load an application into the phone and test to see how it works. Of course, using your mouse & cursor to click, twirl, press or tap the control surfaces on the phone is not the most intuitive or real-life test of how the app responds. I spent a couple anxious minutes trying to figure out if my mouse was broken when trying to get the Blackberry Storm to check out this blog; it turned out I just had to be a bit more patient.
Anyway, to use DeviceAnywhere, you have to download its proprietary application and install it locally on your computer (Mac or PC), and establish an account. They give you 3 hours of test time to start out with, and it’s measured out in 6-minute chunks, kinda like how a lawyer bills.
You can also use the phone to send and receive SMS messages, play multimedia content, and even make calls. I can’t help it – my mind immediately went to some “Bourne Identity” type scenario, where you could use the phones to make calls that make it look like you’re calling from Germany or Spain … although anyone savvy enough to use a service like this one to “launder” their user information would be more than sharp enough to figure out easier ways.
Anyway, to use the phones, you right-click on the handset that you want to check out, and choose “Acquire Device” (see below).
You can also click to bring up a window with all the data about the phone in it, such as the OS, memory, processor speed, whether it runs Flash Lite, etc.
It’s kinda addictive to put these devices through their paces – for anyone who’s got a real curious streak, DeviceAnywhere warns that the quickest way to run through your trial minutes is to check out a whole bunch of phones at once and get so caught up with toying with them that you forget to keep an eye on the little taxi cab meter.
To me, one of the cooler things is the little broom that appears after you’ve “hung up” the phone when your test session is done: the DeviceAnywhere guys basically run a script (and how many hours it took to grind out something that will do this across all the thousands of handsets they have on file) that wipes the memory and OS free of whatever programs you’ve uploaded or sites you’ve visited. Dunno why this strikes me as so cool, but it does.
Lastly, check out the DeviceAnywhere blog. Good stuff there, such as this recent post on trends in the mobile development world – particularly revealing are the shift in numbers in what people are working on in mobile. A couple years ago, most companies were focusing in on games or ringtones, because that was pretty much the only way to make money from mobile content.
These days, the mobile web is blowing up (a 100% jump YOY), and mobile banking/payment is hot on its heels. There are twice as many people working on mobile web sites and apps, well, pretty much because a couple of yo-hos in a garage can dream of hitting it big with an iPhone app, while not everyone can set up their own bank (the antics of the various players involved in the subprime mortgage mess notwithstanding).
