Marketfederation

One of the big challenges facing mobile application developers is accessing and testing the thousands of handsets in the market. For example, when Movaya launched our hosted WAP storefront as part of PlugNPlay 2.0, we had to ensure that the storefront worked well across our nearly 500 supported devices here in the US. Buying all of those devices was not an option, so we turned to a service provided by Mobile Complete called DeviceAnywhere.

DeviceAnywhere is an online service that provides access to hundreds of real handsets, on live worldwide networks, remotely over the Internet - for all your mobile development, porting and testing needs. Anything you can do with a device in your hand, you can do with the handsets in DeviceAnywhere - in real-time.

The Movaya team has been pleased with the service and just about everyone else we’ve talked to who has used the service has been satisfied as well. So, we were interested to hear that Mobile Complete announced a new service today called “TryPhone,” which contains fully-functional, virtual phones designed specifically for mobile consumers. TryPhone allows users to test-drive mobile devices online before purchasing. Consumers can access the site, by going to www.tryphone.com.

Through the free TryPhone Web service, individuals have access to a variety of phones on which they can press buttons, run programs, and experience and compare different handsets. The service also allows consumers to read reviews, watch demos and compare different devices.

At launch you can try out four phones: the Blackberry Pearl, Samsung Juke, LG Muziq and the Apple iPhone. Additional phones will be added to the portfolio on a weekly basis.

The service is pretty cool, and deciding on a new phone can be a painful process, especially if you’re looking at devices from different carriers - this would require a lot of time, energy an interaction with unpredictable sales staff in the stores. So, being able to test drive phones online first makes a lot of sense and Mobile Complete has their act together as a company, so this should do well. Try it out and let us know what you think.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 10:35 pm and is filed under iPHONE News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.