Mobile phone development with DeviceAnywhere.com

Need to test your mobile phone application live, and online? Is your target market located in the US? DeviceAnywhere.com provides the kind of service most hand held and cellphone application developers have been looking for: development testing on a "virtual" yet "live" cellphone, without actually being there. Furthermore, the service actually lets you do testing on a variety of cellphones available, and on different network carriers, allowing you to see first-hand how your application would look like before it actually gets deployed.

Catering to an overseas audience
This situation is quite common among local outsourcing firms that need to deal with overseas clients in remote locations such the US, UK and Australia, with the United States being the main market. If you're a developer based in India, the Philippines or elsewhere, then you will find this downloadable, Java-based tool very useful indeed, because it shows you "in real time" how your programs would look like as if they were on the phone itself before they're deployed. The handsets themselves are geographically located in the US, which you could control remotely. This saves you the trouble of actually finding physically-available handsets for you to test on, which could probably cost you a lot (including subscription and the phone itself).

How it works





















Once you've got everything installed and running, you'll see a window similar to the image above. The top left panel shows the Device Collaboration and Interactive Access sections.

Device collaboration shows your phones that are currently being monitored and shared (with other developers)

Interactive access displays the clickable list of phones that you're currently using.

You can choose more than 1 unit from a wide selection of phones available, usually 2 at a time. To use a unit, you must "acquire" it. Right click on the selection at the left panel and choose "Acquire device", locking the device so only you can use it (since you will be sharing access to the phones with other developers' accounts, there are times that a phone will be busy and locked in to another user's session, i.e. when you right click on it, it says "Wait for Device"). Once you have the device under your control, it becomes active and shows up on the right frame. By the way, your credits (no. of hours) are consumed every time a phone is active ("Acquired"), so if you're a bit stingy on your free prepaid hours you could just "Release" the phone until the next time you need it.

Getting started
To get an account, you could apply for the 5-hour trial first if you want to try the service out and see if you like it, or simply purchase one online (10 hours preloaded ) using your credit card.

Another practical option though, is to apply for a separate Sprint Application Developer account which lets you use the service (for free) for 10 hours. If you're looking for the most effective option without the cost, then this is the way to go.

For more info and tutorials on using DeviceAnywhere:

DeviceAnywhere.com
MobileComplete Official Website