Why Virtualize the mobile ??

Question

Virtualizing the mobile is way different from virtualizing the server or the desktop, where in the the hardware components are almost standardized [like the keyboard, mouse , usb, LAN etc] so the hardware could be easily abstracted for any of the OS.

While on a mobile there is a multitude of hardware [like the iphone touch screen, stylus ... other add ons ] and there is a very less interoperability among all the types of phones or there is very less feature set common to all the mobile hardware. One cannot use iphone gestures on a nokia phone that doesnot have a touch surface.

What drives one to virtualize the mobile ?

Answer 1

Not everyone can afford to supply their testers/developers with full-blown mobiles. That's when virtualization comes into game as nearly everyone today has a computer capable of running some kind of VM.

Answer 2

There's also the twin drives of:

• It's useful for cases like S60 and Windows mobile where there isn't the gulf between hardware (or perhaps virtualise your android mobile so you can use WM until android stops being shaky and having huge root exploits :))
• Because they can

I'm interested in this from the developer side though, as I have to develop for symbian all the time, and it could reduce the number of phone variants I have to developer test on :)