I have an iPhone, and i love it, and I’m pretty confident that when I’m developing a website it’ll look good and work well with Safari for iOS (except for that pesky Flash animation stuff).
But I have never used a Blackberry or and Android phone, I’ve not dipped my toes in the murky developmental waters of mobile browsers. The main reason is that getting my hands on even the cheapest entry-level Blackberry, Android, Symbian or Windows mobile would set me back more than I care to spend.
But luckily, there are some developers out there who can help! Android have an SDK (Software Developers Kit), which has an Android simulator built in, so even if you’re not developing Android Applications you can still use it to test out your websites. You can get Android versions all the way back to 1.5, plus a load of sample code and API information.
It’s a little clunky and occasionally crashes, but it looks good and is a really useful tool. Find it at: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
For Blackberry, there’s the Blackberry Smartphone Simulator, slightly smoother and easier to install than the Android app, but with fewer options. It gives you a choice of Blackberry handsets to simulate that allow you to browse the device and the internet and test your sites there. Get it at: http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/resources/simulators.jsp
Windows Phone 7 and Safari iOS are slightly easire to code for, seeing as how their big brothers in the desktop world are already available. However, with Microsoft’s disastrous entry into the mobile handset world with the ill-fated Kin, Microsoft may have lost the smartphone battle before it’s begun.
Windows Phone 7 hasn’t set the world on fire yet, but the SDK was released in mid-September and a Windows Phone Emulator is available to download at http://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started.
Safari for the iPhone is by far the most advanced of mobile browsers, and simply by using tools such as http://iphonetester.com in Safari you can see how your sites will render.
Mobile development is a blessing and a curse. great that we can have so much choice of smartphones, but, as a developer, it’s a pain to test in all the desktop browsers as well as an additional 4 mobile browsers.
So check your clients’ analytics, work out how much traffic they are getting from mobile devices, and split up your time accordingly.