Opera Mobile Emulator
Mobile devices, from smartphones to tablets, start to become popular for normal web related tasks like visiting websites, watching movies or playing games. This can be attributed to the advancement of hardware to make the devices faster and more responsive, software like Opera Mobile that make the most out of what little space and speed you have and Internet rates that do not bankrupt you if you happen to stay connected for a few hours.
The rise of mobile devices poses a new challenge for webmasters, who now have ensure that users who visit their sites from mobile devices have the best possible experience doing so.
Opera Mobile Emulator is one tool to aid webmasters in this task. The program emulates Opera Mobile running on various devices on a Windows desktop system.
You need to install Opera Mobile Emulator on Windows before it can be used. It opens up with a configuration screen that you can use to select a pre-configured profile or a custom profile for the emulator.
Available devices are Samsung Galaxy S, HTC Wilfdire, Motorola Droid X, LG Optimus One, Nokia N900 and about a dozen or so others. The resolution is automatically selected for those devices and all that is left for you to do is to click launch to start the emulator.
You can alternatively select custom from the profile drop down to configure a custom resolution, pixel density and input method (touch, keypad, tablet).
The emulator itself behaves like Opera Mobile would on the device, with the benefit that you can use the Windows keyboard and mouse to use it.
The idea behind the emulator is to give webmasters a tool at hand to verify that their websites display as good as possible on mobile devices. It can furthermore be used as a tool during web development to make sure that the website displays fine for a specific device or resolution.
Opera Mobile Emulator is an 11 Megabyte download for Windows, Linux and Mac. Webmasters who want to test how their websites display on various mobile devices should give it a try.
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also available for linux! and guessing from their screenshots for mac as well.
Robin thanks for the tip, I have modified the article accordingly.
This is brilliant. Really good way of seeing how your website will appear to mobile users.