DeviceAnywhere -- a walk through of the developer's godsend

I still meet people who either haven’t heard of DeviceAnywhere‘s services or don’t quite ‘get’ what they offer. It’s a constant irritation. Ever since I got a demonstration of it about 9 months ago, I’ve been telling everyone and anyone about it. I’m also proper-made-up, as they say in some parts of the North of Britain, that they agreed to chip in and support my on-going quest for folk to get a grip and use these types of services.

I decided we needed to do a roadshow a few months ago. Spread the word. The mobile industry is difficult enough (as per my piece on Monday) without adding even more arse in the form of development and testing woes.

(If, by the way, I was aware of any competitors with such a comprehensive offering, I’d also be including them too.)

I’ve already covered the basic proposition of DeviceAnywhere in a previous post so here’s a quick primer before we jump in:

You want to test your applications and services on hundreds of different devices on different networks, right? Don’t buy them all yourself, just log on to DeviceAnywhere’s site and, bish-bash-bosh, you’ll be using a real, live unit, remotely. Don’t mess around testing easily repeatable actions on a ton of different devices, DeviceAnywhere’ll do that.

Right.

I logged into DeviceAnywhere and added a few packages to my account. First off I chose 3UK. This really is a piece of genius, this service. With the 3UK package, you get to play with a total of 39 live devices. That is, 39 devices that you can remotely mess around with — each with it’s own sim card and account on 3UK. A quick glance down the list shows handsets from 3’s key suppliers — LG, Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. They have, ready for me to play with (amongst others) the U-300 and U970 from LG, a horrifying RAZR 3x from Motorola, a veritable cacophony of Nokias (6000 series, E61, E65, N70, N73, N95) and a big showing of Sonys (K530 all the way up to the K850 and W950s).

I want a bit of variety with my testing.

I decided to add AT&T! Woo! I can actually check out American devices — all 158 of them!

And that’s only the first of four pages worth of devices, standing by for testing.

What about the Vodafone and o2 range of test units? Here’s Voda’s first page:

And o2’s first page:

(Interesting to see the “Helio Cocoon” — for a moment I thought that was referring to the US MVNO…)

Right, let’s have a play with one of the devices.

It’s quite simple. At the top of the DeviceAnywhere page, there’s a toolbar:

See the big orange button? Click it and then this pops up:

DeviceAnywhere’s Studio is java-based so it’ll work on whatever you’re using, provided you’ve got Java support (sometimes I use it via my Apple, other times via a nearby PC).

Here’s the login box via my Apple:

You need to allow the app to load it’s various datasets — perhaps a 2-3 minutes — and then you’re up and running.

Now, before we go there. I’ve actually uploaded Anthony Pranata’s brilliant ‘Screenshot’ application to my DeviceAnywhere library — the concept being that I’m pretending I’ve just made it and I’m going to demonstrate it working for you with DeviceAnywhere Studio. I thought it’d be neat to publish a screenshot I took on a remote device in this manner (Although you can take snapshots and video from the Studio easily).

Right! Let’s get the Studio up…

There’s my package — it’s defaulted to Vodafone UK. Scroll down and I can choose to visit and play about with any one of the devices that’s available. Sometimes you’ll see someone’s already working on one and it’ll be marked with a little no-entry sign. You can choose to hop on to it the moment they’ve finished work.

Let’s swap to my AT&T package:

Ok. Let’s have a look at the E61…

Click, click… woosh. It’s mine for the moment! See the locked icon?

Right. Let’s have a play!

It’s startling when the device pops up on your screen like this:

I’m hesitant for a moment then I decided to click about on the E61’s keypad…

The device wake’s up from standby:

Right, let’s get on the net, eh?

Before I know it I’m surfing AT&T’s homepage and trying to search for Anthony’s site:

I typed the URL incorrectly! So I thought I’d then try out a Nokia N95 from Vodafone:

See how you can run devices next to each other? Wicked! I typed in Anthony’s site URL and woosh:

A quick glance into the N95’s applications folder confirms the app installed:

.. and here it is running!

Then I installed Nimbuzz. Worked like a charm… and then I decided it was time to play with the iPhone! I wanted to give that a go…

I’m without my iPhone at the moment as I’ve given it to my other half… so let’s have a look at SMS Text News on the iPhone’s Safari browser:

Nice! Ok. Right. Now I want to add a bookmark on to the front screen… (I’m simply dragging my mouse over the iPhone as though I was tapping it with my finger)

And let’s see if the icon is there…

Ah, brilliant! There it is.

So that ends the walk-through.

If you’re a developer charged with making your service available to as many people as possible across this mobile industry of ours, I defy you not to get value from DeviceAnywhere. If you’d like a trial, you can get a few hours free with no commitments from their site at www.deviceanywhere.com with immediate activation. If you’d like a bit more time, drop me a mail (ewan@smstextnews.com) and I’ll get you double the time to play with. Once you’re out of trial, the cost starts at around $100/month per package (depending on promotions) and then around $16 an hour.

Interestingly, there’s a feature on the DeviceAnywhere site under your account that lists the most popular devices and operators being tested that day, by package. The winner today form the 3UK package? The E61. And the AT&T package? The Apple iPhone. No surprise, eh?

Back to the roadshow. We’re visiting ShopQwik soon and then Palringo. Standby!