Mobile App Testing

Since this was the last hoorah for Microsoft at CES, we’re not completely surprised that they decided to start some controversy. With a little help from Nokia, it looks like a new mobile war is underway. Make of this what you will (via Wired):

Nokia declared all-out war on the mobile industry on Monday, publicly unveiling its flagship U.S. device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The new device, the Nokia Lumia 900, is the first Nokia-made phone to run on AT&T’s 4G LTE network, the high-speed wireless mobile network slowly expanding across the States.

The Lumia 900 runs the Windows Phone operating system, and in showing off the device, Nokia president and CEO Stephen Elop re-emphasized Nokia’s dedication to Microsoft’s mobile platform. Nokia is the only major mobile device manufacturer to bet the house completely on Microsoft’s platform alone (other Windows Phone manufacturers like HTC and Samsung also make Android phones).

“We believe that the industry has shifted from a battle of devices, to a war of ecosystems,” Elop said at a press conference on Monday. “With Lumia, our intent is to establish a series of beachheads…it started in Europe, now in the U.S., and more in the coming year.”

Elop wasn’t alone. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer joined Elop, his former Microsoft lieutenant, at the press conference on stage, a clear signal that the companies are betting big on one another. Towering above Elop and the rest of the crowd on stage, Ballmer delivered the rallying cry for his company’s small-but-rapidly developing platform at the event.

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Here to explain the basics for testing apps within the Symbian mobile operating system is uTester Julio Alejandro Tristan. This is the third installment of the “crash course” series, but you can find them all in the uTest Forums (membership required). Enjoy!

Background: Symbian is an open source operation system and software platform designed for smartphones and maintained by Nokia.

Versions of symbian and list of sample devices

• Series 60 3^rd Edition

Examples: Nokia 5320 XpressMusic, Nokia 5630 XpressMusic, Nokia 5730 XpressMusic, Nokia 6210 Navigator, Nokia 6220 Classic, Nokia 6650 fold, Nokia 6710 Navigator, Nokia 6720 Classic, Nokia 6730 Classic, Nokia 6760 Slide, Nokia 6790 Surge, Nokia C5-00, Nokia E5-00, Nokia E52, Nokia E55, Nokia E71, Nokia E72, Nokia E75, Nokia N78, Nokia N79, Nokia N85, Nokia N86 8MP, Nokia N96, Nokia X5, Samsung GT-i8510 (INNOV8), Samsung GT-I7110, Samsung SGH-L870, Nokia C5-00

• Symbian^1 (Series 60 5^th Edition)

Examples: Nokia 5228, Nokia 5230, Nokia 5233, Nokia 5235 , Nokia 5250, Nokia 5530 XpressMusic, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition, Nokia C5-03, Nokia C6-00, Nokia N97, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia X6 , Samsung i8910 Omnia HD,Sony Ericsson Satio, Sony Ericsson Vivaz, Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro

• Symbian^1: For the Japanese market
• Symbian^3/Symbian^4

Examples: Nokia N8, Nokia C6-01, Nokia C7-00, Nokia E7-00

How can I find the series of my Symbian device?

In order to find the series of your Symbian device you must follow these few steps:

Settings>Phone>Phone mngmt.>About>and then the first line of text says the serie and version of your Symbian OS.

How can I find the firmware version of my Symbian device?

Nokia ——————– *#0000#
Samsung —————- *#9999# or *#1234#
Sony-Ericsson ———– Right, *, Left, Left, *, Left (Using D-Pad)

Application testing:

Here are some issues to check when you are facing a Symbian application test:

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True, the leaked rant by Nokia’s CEO has little to do with mobile app testing (though I’m sure there’s a connection somewhere), but there’s just too much blog gold here to pass up.

In case you missed it, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop sent out an internal memo ripping employees and management, saying that the Nokia platform “is burning” and that the company lacks leadership and accountability.

The document made the rounds on all the popular tech blogs, even some mainstream news sites. But hey, bad publicity is better than none at all, right?

Here are some excerpts from the now external memo:

“…there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.”

“They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.”

“Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.”

“We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.”

“…Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements…”
“Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem.”

“We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally. Nokia, our platform is burning.”

Bold move, Elop. Let’s see if this turns things around.

A few weeks back, guest blogger Anuj Gupta laid out the basics of mobile operating systems and platforms, where he covered Symbian, iPhone, Windows Mobile and RIM OS among others. Here is part II of the article. In this post, Anuj dives into BREW, J2me, Maemo, Limo Qtopia and others.

Anuj is a Creative Writer, Marcom Consultant and a Technology enthusiast with 4+ years of experience in Mobile technologies and Advertising. He undertakes various freelance assignments apart from his job as a marcom executive in an IT firm. Read more of his writings at http://www.techmodish.blogspot.com/.

BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) from Qualcomm

Brew is an application development platform originally developed for CDMA mobile phones, but it also supports GSM  for some devices. It debuted in September 2001 as a software platform. It can download and run small programs for playing games, sending messages, sharing photos, and the like. The main advantage of BREW platforms is that the application developers can easily port their applications between all Qualcomm devices. BREW acts between the application and the wireless device on-chip operating system in order to allow programmers to develop applications without needing to code for system interface or understand wireless applications.

J2me by Sun

Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) is Sun’s version of Java aimed at machines with limited hardware resources such as PDAs, cell phones, and other consumer electronic and embedded devices. J2ME is aimed at machines with as little as 128KB of RAM and with processors a lot less powerful than those used on typical desktop and server machines. J2ME actually consists of a set of profiles. Each profile is defined for a particular type of device — cell phones, PDAs, microwave ovens, etc. — and consists of a minimum set of class libraries required for the particular type of device and a specification of a Java virtual machine required to support the device.

The most common of these are the Mobile Information Device Profile aimed at mobile devices, such as cell phones, and the Personal Profile aimed at consumer products and embedded devices like set-top boxes and PDAs. Profiles are subsets of configurations, of which there are currently two: the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and the Connected Device Configuration (CDC).

There are more than 2 billion Java ME enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

Maemo from Nokia

Maemo is a software platform developed by Nokia for smartphones and Internet Tablets. It is based on the Debian operating system.

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The mobile industry is being increasing cluttered with jargon, says Anuj Gupta, our latest guest blogger for mobileapptesting.com. In this post, Anuj clears the air with an essential primer for anyone remotely involved in the mobile testing space, including discussions on the most popular operating systems and application platforms for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows mobile and more.

Mobile devices are evolving into increasingly sophisticated general purpose computers and this has led to the development of a variety of platforms and operating systems in the mobile space. Today, the operating system lying inside your mobile device is equally important as the device manufacturer (OEM). The various features, GUI, processing speed, and most importantly, the applications available for your device will depend greatly on the underlying OS.

Unfortunately, industry jargon has cluttered our understanding of this emerging technology. It is my intention to clear the air on a few of these misunderstandings. Here goes….

Manufacturers launch devices based on various user segments, and giving rise to a number of Mobile OS and Application platforms. A mobile OS manages the hardware and software resources of a mobile device, similar to that of a computer OS. Some OS platforms cover the entire range of the software stack, while others may only include the lower levels (typically the kernel and middleware layers) and rely on additional software platforms to provide a user interface framework.

Today’s phones are expected to run a growing range of software such as internet browsers, navigation packages, games and music/video players. Application platforms are supposed to provide a ground for them.  Application platforms are built over lower-level kernel operating systems (OS) such as Rex, Linux or compact real-time OS’s such as Nucleus. Software running on the device accesses platform resources through a set of application programming interfaces or APIs. Application development platforms, such as Brew, Symbian UIQ, Android, LIMO, ALP, Qtopia or WIPI provide programming resources for native and Java applications.

Mobile developers typically develop for multiple platforms to maximize their available market. This can be a difficult and time-consuming task as multiple platforms use different API calls for common OS operations and accessing OS resources such as accessing memory and files.

There is a variety of both the OS and the application platforms in the market. Obviously, some are more dominant than others. Here is a list of major mobile operating systems and Application platforms.

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Back in 2008, Opera’s web browser was ruthlessly banished from Mobileland (i.e. Nokia handsets). As it turns out, the small dev team responsible for its creation did not disband, as previously thought, but rather went underground to continue their work in secret.

Today, David Neal with the Inquirer (.net that is) wrote a story titled “Opera Previews Mobile Browser on Maemo”, which covers the browser’s triumphant return to Nokia handsets. This story is now all over the web. You can read more it on CNET, UberGizmo, as well as NetworkWorld – which details how Opera is now enabling testing of mobile sites on a desktop. More on this subject shortly.

In the meantime, here are two extracts from Neal’s piece, which contains several implications for mobile app testers:

The preview has not seen much in the way of rigorous testing, he said, but it does have a lot of new features. More casual users may baulk at statements like, “This also means that there may never be a ‘final’ release of Opera Mobile 10 for Maemo devices, since it’s just that much more fun to add shiny new features rather than fixing boring old bugs,” but hobbyists or developers might enjoy breathing new life into the Nokia mobiles.

Listed known bugs include no support for Adobe Flash, some screen tearing, non-working on-screen keyboards, and no power management features. This latter issue may be serious for anyone who uses the phone on the move. As Öhrn explained, “Power is drained even when Opera is running in the background and/or the screen is turned off.”

Users can report issues to the team using a bug wizard, and we expect they will encounter some.

Do you plan on testing this new browser? If so, send your bugs, reviews and thoughts to me at mikeb@utest.com.

Happy mobile testing. Much more on this development in the future….