iPhone Compatible

iPhone Compatibility Test

Can’t get hold of an iPhone but eager to check how your site might look on the hottest device of the moment?

Enter the iPhoney: a small (1.3MB) desktop application that simulates web browsing on the newly released device.

This cleverly named app is a great tool for developers who want a rough idea of whether their site will be usable by the one million iPhone owners who signed up in the first six days. With bumper sales like that, it’s conceivable that visitors browsing on an iPhone could amount to a significant percentage of your site’s visitors.

Sure, developers have always been able to re-size their window to test how a site renders on smaller screens, but the beauty of this app is:

• You can instruct it to send the iPhone User Agent string, in case the site you’re checking performs any content negotiation based on this string.
• You can instruct it to disable plugins such as Flash and JavaScript, which aren’t yet supported by the iPhone.
• You can quickly rotate the viewport, as you can on the real thing.
• Resizing your browser just isn’t as much fun as loading up an iPhone look-alike on your screen.

iPhoney is only available for Mac at this point, although given the recent release of Safari for Windows, and the fact that the code has been open sourced, I imagine that a Windows port is not far off.

The great thing about users who are passionate about your product — they’ll create stuff that supports and promotes it all on their own! I don’t know why phone companies don’t offer something like this as a free download — what better way to promote your phone?