Testing Responsive Design

[Buzby]

Just after some advice on what Android products I could buy on ebay, which will be cheap, but more important, will be fine for checking the responsive design of sites.

I have many IOS devices but don't really know anything about Android products.

They will only be used to test sites so fancy features, quality of device etc are not needed.

I'm assuming just a phone and tablet will do the job!!!

[printerbase]

Have you thought about online phone emulators ?

I haven't tried them myself but have a look at:
http://www.mobilephoneemulator.com/
http://mobiletest.me/

Probably loads of others.

Peter

[Buzby]

Hi,

I don't really 100% trust them. Would rather test on a live device.

[Mike Hughes]

I'm not sure this would be the right way to do it as I suspect you'll only be able to test one screen size per device and the cheap ones aren't necessarily going to have the same characteristics as the devices your customers are using.

And then you have Samsung Touchwiz / Galaxy devices that don't use the stock Android browser (or didn't at one stage, as an IOS user I haven't kept up with this.)

In other words, I think that just because it works properly on one android device means little other than being a quick cursory test.

[saucysal]

Somebody recommended to me, but have not tried myself yet, http://saucelabs.com where you can set up an account for testing on various browsers and devices.

Sarah

[saucysal]

As a preliminary test while working on a design, I just reduce the screen size in my browser (IE11 with Windows 7) to the size of a mobile phone or tablet to get an idea of whether the responsive design is working, and then test on actual devices later after uploading to test site.

Sarah

[UKCCSam]

You could just use Google Chrome.

Right click any page (preview page for example), then 'Inspect Element'.

Select the 'Toggle Device Mode' icon in the top left corner of the Developer Tools panel/window. This lets you select a range of popular smartphone/tablet devices and see what the website looks rendered on these screensizes (and you can stretch horizontal and vertical to test other sizes).

Since "responsive" for SellerDeck is based on CSS Media tags, this testing ground essentially replicates exactly what you're going to see on a mobile device, fully cross browser and cross platform.

[Mike Hughes]

Oohh that's interesting. I'll have to play with that a bit.

Thanks.

[brucet]

For responsive testing SellerDeck uses a combination of emulators and physical devices, including (from memory) Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus and Sony Xperia. On these we test with the original Android browser as well as Chrome, but the proportion of people using it is small and reducing.

There can be differences in touch and other behaviours between different browsers and devices, but Chrome seems reasonably consistent across the board.