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From computing to cooking, we all have a set of favorite items for doing what we love. Bagcheck is a fun way to share what's inside our "bags".

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• Jul10

  Mobile Device Testing: The Gear

  By Luke Wroblewski

  The mobile era of computing is here. Global shipments of smartphones surpassed global shipments of desktop and laptop computers combined at the end of 2010 —two years earlier than predicted. So designing and developing Web sites today means testing on mobile devices. But with hundreds of mobile devices to choose from... what needs to be in your testing arsenal and why?

  Thankfully several mobile aficionados on Bagcheck have taken the time to catalog their devices and give us a glimpse into the mobiles they design and develop for.

  Peter-Paul Koch (ppk) has been running QuirksMode.org since 2003. During that time his site has become the top source for Web browser compatibility information on the Internet including mobile browser comparisons and capabilities. When testing what mobile browsers are capable of, here's what ppk is using:

  

  Peter-Paul Koch's Mobile device arsenal

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  You may expect to find many things in Scotland's capital but some of the most influential thinking about the mobile Web? Yes —because Edinburgh is where the top-notch team of Bryan and Stephanie Rieger (otherwise known as Yiibu) reside and produce masterful overviews of what's happening on the mobile Web across the World. They've been working on mobile long enough to have seen it all and their mobile device collection is all the proof you need:

  

  Bryan Rieger's Yiibu's Tools of the Trade

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  While we're on the topic of mobile design duos. Oliver Weidlich and Rod Farmer are the founders of Mobile Experience in Australia. In their mobile field research and design work they've come to rely on this set of devices:

  

  Oliver Weidlich's Mobile Experience's Mobile Devices for Research, Design & Play

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  On the other side of the ocean, this year Techworld's Mobile Product of the Year award went to Salesforce.com's Chatter Mobile. But before they got their honors, the team behind Chatter had to test across many devices. Here's what the design group used for usability and user acceptance testing:

  

  Craig Villamor's Devices for a Mobile Design Team

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  What does Texas Style Smoked Brisket have to with a mobile device arsenal? Ken Skistimas has got both in the bag. Ken's a mobile UX designer at Rhapsody but with the amount of device testing he's doing, he sometimes feels like a member of the QA team. To keep up to date on his product's latest builds he relies on a sampling of the various mobile platforms out there.

  

  Ken Skistimas's A Designer's Mobile Device Arsenal

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  Of course, I can't talk about mobile device testing on Bagcheck without highlighting some of the gear we've been using to make sure our mobile Web experience works across an ever increasing number of devices. While we don't have the resources of a Rhapsody or Salesforce.com, we strongly believe in always testing on real devices when designing for mobile. So here's what's in our (hopefully) growing mobile arsenal:

  

  Big Bagger's Bagcheck Mobile Device Lab

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  Lastly, just because you don't own a mobile device doesn't mean you can't test on it. The Bagcheck product team (all two of us) have been known to head over to our local wireless store and test things on their demo devices. In fact, it was at a T-Mobile shop in Palo Alto, CA that we realized we should be serving our mobile Web experience to the seven inch Galaxy Tab.

  

  Samsung Galaxy Tab 3G, AT&T, 7inch

  Enjoy a rich, brilliant viewing experience wherever you roam with the Android-powered, 3G-enabled Samsung Galaxy Tab mobile tabl…

  The condensed format of the seven inch tablet made the mobile experience feel right at home, which we couldn't have been sure of without using the device first hand.

  

  Bagcheck's mobile Web experience on the 7 inch Galaxy Tab

  by lukew

  If heading over to your local wireless store isn't your thing, perhaps a community device testing lab is. Through the (upcoming) non-profit organization Mobile Portland, Jason Grigsby and the Cloud Four team have set up a collection of shared devices that allows teams to try their products out on many different mobiles. Many of the devices in Cloud Four's current lab will eventually make their to Mobile Portland.

  

  Jason Grigsby's Cloud Four Mobile Device Testing

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  Update

  Here's a few more folks that have take the time to share their mobile device testing gear.

  

  Brad Frost's Mobile Lab Testing Devices

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  Jonny Schneider's Mobile device test kit

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  Your Turn...

  If you've made jump over to mobile design and development, we want to know what's in your mobile device arsenal. Hop onto Bagcheck and make a bag of your mobile gear. You can even do it on your mobile device (provided we've tested on it!).

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  Comments

  • 

    Craig Sullivan One really important thing in my toolkit - DeviceAnywhere. I can rent pretty much any mobile device and remote control it in the country I want, attached to the telco I want.
    
    These are real phones and I can install apps, use the data connection or wifi, make calls, browse the web like I had it in my hand.
    
    Although we keep test handsets around for the major market share iOS, Android, Blackberry devices, we always test to about 95% of all handsets that visit in a 3 month period.
    
    We tried buying lots of handsets but deviceanywhere is just as good and also reflects a real customer experience on different networks. I can't praise it highly enough - it saves us time, means we hit extremely high compatibility and the sites are now taking more than 20% of our online business.
    
    Testing rocks.
    7 months
  • 

    Andy Matthews These are the devices I use for mobile development.
    bagcheck.com/bag/205…
    

    

    Attached: Mobile Device Testing
    by Andy Matthews

    6 months
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