We are getting ready to launch a mobile site and are wondering what the best way of testing across as many mobile browsers as possible would be?
This could be a company that does this sort of thing, or a way in which to do it in-house, we're not being picky.
http://mobiready.com/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN
Emulators
http://developer.openwave.com/dvl/tools_and_sdk/phone_simulator/choosing.htm
You may also want to try using Firefox and modifying the headers along with a user agent switcher.
It may be even more tricky than you think as operators may 'tweak' the look and feel of phones in their network. Similarly they may use optimisers or content filters which will change how your site looks between networks (and even between APNs on the same network - i.e. a business APN may reduce picture resolution or block certain media types, while a normal consumer one would let everything through). I think this type of thing is becoming less prevalent as users with powerful smart phones and mobile broadband demand 'normal' wired like experience, but it does still exist and may be important for your site.
There is at least one company that offers a sort of virtual 'deploy anywhere' service so you can test your application or website on any phone type in any network (in theory, I am sure there are limits): http://www.deviceanywhere.com
Note I have nothing to do with these guys and have never used them, but the service they offer seems useful and I am sure they have some competitors you can look at also.
If you're about to launch, you've left it a bit late! Testing mobile web apps is a difficult job and should be done ongoing. There are three things you can test:
Assuming that you generate HTML specific to various mobile phones - you'll need to test your HTML generation. For this, use the Firefox UA switcher plugin. Note - this will do nothing to test how HTML is actually displayed on mobile devices, it will just test that your server side HTML generation is recognising different UA strings and rendering expected HTML
Test mobile device browsers as much as possible. Somebody has already listed a bunch of emulators - I've had mixed results with these. They are a significant step up on just the Firefox UA switcher, but don't assume that these accurately emulate the mobile browser - think of it more as a useful guide
Test mobile browser + mobile network. Someone else has also alluded to the fact that mobile carriers do funny things to the traffic. If your web app is targeted at a specific region, then get mobile phones from operators in that region and test on those operators networks. www.deviceanywhere.com is good for this, but limited in the regions it covers - namely North America & Western Europe. Device Anywhere are not the only vendor in this area, but they are the only one's I've used.
In addition to this, try to identify the region & target audience for your app and from this come up with a short list of phones to cover. e.g. If it is a business app, then think BlackBerry. Also, make sure that your app is gathering statistics so you can see what devices are really accessing the site and ensure that these devices are on the list you test with in future.
Good luck!