I’ve just finished listening to the first episode of Unfinished Business, a podcast by Andy Clark and Anna Debenham that tackles topics on the business side of being a freelancer / running a design agency. It was an interesting first show, but one discussion in particular caught my attention. It was about what mobile devices you should aim to have on hand for testing, and it got me thinking…

They both agreed that it was important to have a range of devices that offered different user experiences. You can therefore get a much better idea of how people might be interacting with the things you make - this could be a desktop computer, a mobile phone, and a games console such as a Wii U, which would give you a nice broad spectrum over just 3 devices. And considering that most people now have a smart phone and desktop / laptop it only means one extra purchase - great for anyone running a small business!

I think the word ‘interact’ is the thing that interests me most here, because I don’t necessarily think it’s the most important thing at the moment. I think performance and browser compatibility is.

Now obviously it’s nice to future-proof things and I think it’s great that people like Anna are researching and testing devices like games consoles and TVs because as time goes on these things are only going to get more popular, however if I was to advise a freelancer or small agency on what devices they should be buying and testing on first, I would most definitely push them in the direction of a couple of older mobile phones - the iPhone 3GS and the Samsung Galaxy S. Both are a couple of years old and reasonably priced if you get them second hand, you’re covering the two most popular operating systems (iOS and Android), and there are still a hell of a lot of other similarly powered devices out there (in terms of processing power)… So you’re covering a lot of ground. The older Androids also throw up some interesting CSS issues too, as illustrated in this post on SVG images.

iPhone 3GS Samsung Galaxy S

We’ve got both of these phones as part of our testing suite and I think the lessons learned from them far outweigh anything else that we use.

Obviously it depends on who you build most of your sites for, (and some broad analytical research might help you choose), but with more and more JavaScript and advanced CSS3 being used in every day development, especially when trying to imitate app-like gestures and animations, performance and rendering is extremely important. It’s all very well a site working on your brand new iPhone 5 or MBP, but what about all the other hundreds of thousands, even millions of people who can’t afford to upgrade every year and are still using these slightly dated, but perfectly functional mobile phones to browse the Internet with? (And probably still will be for the next couple of years at least).

Following on from these two devices I’d probably go for a mid-size tablet like a Nexus 7 that’s really useful for testing responsive websites on (especially in portrait orientation), because it’s about half way between a desktop and mobile.

Our full list of in-house mobile testing devices is as follows:

  • iPhone 3GS
  • iPhone 4S
  • iPhone 5
  • HTC Hero
  • Samsung Galaxy S
  • Samsung Galaxy S3
  • Nokia Lumia 710 (Windows Phone 7)
  • iPad 1
  • iPad 3
  • Nexus 7

When the Nokia Lumia 620 (Windows Phone 8) comes out at the end of the month we’ll be getting one of those, too. And then after that we might invest in a Blackberry because both the interaction and performance on these devices is quite different to anything that we’ve currently got. Having said that, unless the market share of Blackberry increases significantly we probably won’t concern ourselves overly with them so long as things don’t look too bad (unless specifically requested by a clint), but I do think that learning their limitations will be very useful. Following these additions I think it would be great to get a games console or smart TV.

I’m absolutely not saying that Andy and Anna’s friendly advice was wrong. I agree that interaction is extremely important too, I just think that performance (and cross-browser compatability) are bigger issues at the moment and the cost of buying a couple of older second hand phones compared to a games console or TV is a bit more manageable for someone just starting out with multiple device testing.

Shortlink:

By Chris Skelton