Mobile App Testing

You know what needs to be done. Yes, you’ve worked hard to develop, test and optimize your mobile site (or native app). But guess what? It’s time to blow it all up and start over. Sound unreasonable? Take a look at what Twitter recently did:

Twitter has redesigned its mobile website using HTML5,turning it into a Web app, which allows the social network’s mobile site to look and act more like the native Twitter apps available on smartphones.

Penner said in a blog post about the update that Twitter scrapped its old mobile site and built the new version ”from the ground up for smartphones and tablets, which have more advanced browsers that support the latest Web technologies, including HTML5.”

The same functions found in Twitter’s smartphone apps are there in the HTML5 mobile site, including the ability to quickly scroll through a user’s timeline, move between tabs to see @mentions and direct messages, search and view trending topics and lists, and of course, write Tweets, she said.

But the HTML5 verison of the mobile site can’t yet be viewed on every smartphone on the market, Penner said.

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Even though there are some built-in applications available with a phone, we also have the option of loading it with our favorite apps. A fantastic thing about  iPhone 4 apps is it that they can be synchronized with your iPad from Mac or PC. The App Store has a wide collection of mobile apps and the following are some of the most popular iPhone applications.

Movies

You can know all about the latest movies using the ‘Movies’ which is a location based free application. Using this application, you can know a lot about reviews, trailers, ticket information and ratings including the directions to your local theatres.

Pandora

Music lovers will find the Pandora feature extremely attractive. Pandora Radio is a free music application that can keep i4 phone users upbeat. You can listen to your favorite songs easily using this feature since it is coordinated with the web. By just naming the song, you can hear it instantly!

Loopt

With Loopt, you can easily understand what is happening around you. Using this application, you can know where your family and friends are and keep in touch with them easily. Loopt in short is a very useful geo-social application that can be of great use to i4 phone users.

Twitter

Another great application that can be used for free is Twitter originally known as Tweetie. You can easily stay connected with your near and dear ones any time of the day using this free application.

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The big mobile news story this week was the launch of Windows Phone 7. We blogged about the various news coverage the device has received earlier this week. Here to offer a first-hand look at the device – it’s features, specifications and more -  is James Coelho, our latest guest blogger.

The big talk of mobile technology right now is the launch of the Windows Phone 7 device line. Let’s see what all the fuss is about, shall we?

The Specs

On paper the individual device specs are on par, and in some cases better than, the top phones on the market. They all sport 1Ghz processors, 4MP camera (or greater), shoot HD video (720p of course), and on board native app support (Netflix, Slacker Radio, Twitter, eBay, and IMDb being featured).

The Things You Expect from a Windows Phone

Windows Phone 7 includes some fairly standard features, such as Windows Live, Bing Search, and Microsoft Office Mobile which has the mobile versions of PowerPoint, Word and Excel as expected. Two new additions however are SharePoint Workspace, which allows you to view and edit documents and save them back to your company SharePoint site, and OneNote, which allows you have sticky notes on your phone.

The Things that Microsoft Will Excite You With

The devices include integrations for two key Microsoft Products, Xbox LIVE and the Zune. Xbox LIVE integration will not just allow you to show off your Halo Stats or your cool avatar to your friends. Instead, Xbox LIVE intends to bring Xbox style gaming to your phone! It looks like Microsoft took this seriously too reaching out to, and securing top gaming titles. EA Games, which is featured by Microsoft, will deliver “Need for Speed™ Undercover,” “Tetris^®” and “The Sims™ 3.” The phones will also be the first to deliver Zune integration on a mobile phone.  Users will be able to play their music library wireless, as well as stream and download new music from the Windows Marketplace.

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From MobileTechWorld.com:

It should come as no surprise that Microsoft has already started to populated the yet unreleased Windows Phone 7 Marketplace with a couple of third-party applications alongside some in-house apps. I already saw this 2 days ago when I was at the Microsoft Campus for some WP7 development work but Justin Angel from Vertigo Software actually decided to take a screenshot of the Zune software and post it on Twitter a couple of hours ago. As you can see in the shot above Microsoft has already released the in-house applications that we saw in the Channel9 video this week and a few third-party apps are already up for grabs. (like Yelp, Hexic etc) Interestingly there’s a YouTube extension to the Music & Video hub which should make everybody happy. WP7 users will apparently be able to directly access Youtube hosted videos via the Zune Hub.

As we noted a few weeks back, Microsoft has been rather aggressive in luring mobile app developers from the iPhone’s and Android’s of the world, and it appears as though this initiative is beginning to pay off.

Needless to say, we’ll be watching the next stages of Windows Phone 7 testing with great interest. What other apps will make their way onto this mobile OS? Is it too little, too late for Microsoft to make inroads in the mobile world?

Stay tuned.

It could be the string of lost calls, the lack of multi-tasking functionality, the non-removable battery – but for whatever reason, more and more users are switching to, well, anything but the iPhone.

Newsweek tech blogger Daniel Lyons is the latest to jump ship. He’s switching to Android. Here’s why:

I used to think that would be enough, that if I could just run my iPhone on Verizon, I’d be happy. Well, no more. The new version of Android—version 2.2, a.k.a. Froyo—blows the doors off the iPhone OS. It’s faster, for one thing. It also will support Flash, something Apple refuses to do, mostly out of spite.

The new Android OS will support tethering, meaning you can use your phone as a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, connecting your computer to the Internet. Apple and AT&T say they’re going to offer tethering—someday. It’s just not clear when. Which is why, just to be mean, Google showed an Android phone tethered to an Apple iPad at Google’s developer conference this week. Big laughs all around.

Lyons’ criticisms are of course nothing new, as thousands of users have expressed similar frustrations. Though they might not agree, it’s important for mobile testers to keep this type feedback in mind when reviewing applications on these devices.

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The WAP Catalog has just posted a terrific app review of Twitter for Blackberry (in case you planned on downloading it). Mobile testers could learn a lot from this thorough content, especially from a usability perspective, so go check it out when you get a second. In the meantime, here are a few brief excerpts:

The Good: Push notifications for Direct Messages (DMs) and integration with BlackBerry’s native message folder make for an impressive experience.

The Bad: This release is still pretty buggy; it hangs and lags too often for a final build, despite perfect 3G and Wi-Fi coverage.

Recommendation: Yes.  Despite the flaws, which can honestly get quite annoying at times, the features and execution are such that I would recommend this application to BlackBerry users.

The Review

I have been using Twitter for Blackberry Public Beta (T4BB for short) for nearly a month now since its release to the public in early April.  Testing of the app has taken place in the Metro Atlanta area with pretty solid 3G and Wi-Fi coverage throughout, on a T-Mobile branded BlackBerry Bold 9700.  T4BB is a feature-rich application that contains all the functionality of the Twitter website, with added flare that will make it instantly familiar to seasoned BlackBerry users (such as the ‘t’ and ‘b’ shortcuts that instantly take you to the top or bottom of your timeline). T4BB will suck the life right out of your battery depending on usage and update settings, but so will any other application that updates itself on regular intervals.

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