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Emulators/ Simulators |
Real Device |
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The emulator/simulator is not always the best type of solution for scenarios such as the ones whereby the testing team needs to validate the performance of the application for a longer period of time. |
The real devices are costly compared to the emulator/simulators. Thereby projects under budget and timeline constraints may risk profitability as well as the viability of the overall project. |
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The emulator/simulator is suitable mostly for certain types of functional test case executions. |
There is a very wide variety of mobile devices from apple to Samsung to android and to Symbian and so on. Considering this wide range of mobile devices it is very hard for the testing team to arrange all sorts of mobile devices while working under considerable amount of budget and timeline related constraints. |
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The emulator/simulator can some time not be supportive of certain types of application and in these cases the testing team may need to purchase software patches which may not always be free but could be costly at times. |
Real Mobile devices when used in the developing stage for unit testing and similar purposes could turn out to be harder to connect to the IDE than the emulators and this causes tremendous problems for debugging and in a project with timeline constraints this may very well hamper the overall conclusion of the project. |
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Not all the emulator/simulator supports the complete gamut of mobile applications. For example the bada simulator supports the Maemo (such as Nokia N900), Symbian Touch (such as Nokia N8) and Symbian non-touch (such as Nokia E71) but it does not support other mobile devices like Android. As per as the application testing functionalities are concerned, bada does not support direct web browsing testing but it allows the user to test and create only webapps and widgets. |
In order to test with the real world devices, the devices need to be always connected to the USB port of the machines. So if the USB ports are not working properly, the testing would not be possible. Without providing adequate security measures mobile devices (if they happen to be costly like the apple Iphone) may be lost or stolen thus hampering the overall effort. Increasing security may also go on to increase the overall expenditure involved with the project. |
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The user has to type manually the URL for opening up the web application which is needed to be tested. To solve this particular issue, the tester may need to create phone bookmarks, short URL services or sending URLs to mobile using Bluetooth connection or creating the webpage that contains some URL-s. The adoption of these procedures would ensure that a lot of very important memory space may be eaten up thus impacting on the overall performance of the application. |