Emulator Testing

Another method of testing a mobile site is to use a phone emulator. This is typically a desktop or Web-hosted application that mimics the device experience for a particular device or class of devices. The accuracy of phone and browser emulators vary from a perfect mimicking of the browser rendering to rough approximations.

While an emulator does not replace testing on an actual device, they are a very useful tool during development to do quick verification of how your code displays without loading it on a real mobile browser. Note that regardless of how perfectly a browser mimics the rendering of page on a real device, they can’t reproduce the overall experience of using a real device, since factors such as network speed and latency are involved. For this reason, emulators are a very useful step in any testing program, but should never be used to replace real device testing.