Testing the site on multiple mobile devices

These days is not enough to test your brand new site on couple of screen resolution/operating system/browser combinations, you need to test your new sites on a large number of mobile devices, covering a wide variety of operating systems, screen sizes and resolutions, from  the iPhone 320×480 to the Nook Color 600×1024. To make the matter worse, these devices can be held vertically or horizontally. What you can do?

Having all these handy is appealing - but not realistic. There are some tools around which might help you, as the one I mentioned in the tip about iPad and Joomla, and you can find more. But what about a simple tool which let you check at least screen-shoots of your site on wide range of devices?

Enter mobilito.net, a free website to take screen-shots on virtual mobile browsers: iPhone 3&4, iPad 1&2, Nexus S, Nook Color, etc. Select a mobile device , choose your device orientation (vertical or horizontal), and take a screen-shot of any public website. That is an easy way to validate a layout on multiple devices.

Mobilito.net has a few limitations. First, it has a limited selection of devices: no Galaxy Nexus, no Kindle Fire, etc. Hopefully those will be added soon. Secondly, it caches screen-shots for a day: if you enter the same URL within 24 hours, you will get the same screen-shot. You can get around this by modifying the URL slightly, by adding a query-string to it, as "&foo". Yes, the trick works, and this way you have an added benefit: you can check more, than just your fronpage/default page, as with the majority of the similar tools,  just copy-paste any URL of your site in the interface - and the screenshoot will be delivered by you in few seconds!

The site can be also used to convince your existing customers to pay attention to these devices: you can show them how good the new site you developed to them looks on these devices - or how bad is looking their actual site, obviously needing an urgent face-lift you can provide to them Wink