Thursday, May 5, 2011

eValid Applied To Mobile Devices

In response to some user's questions, we recently did some experimentation with evalid imitating different mobile devices. The question was, can eValid show the differences between server response on a variety of mobile devices?

We used the SetUserAgent command to set eValid to provide authentication as if from a different user agent. We chose to use the user agent string for an iPhone -- not for any particular reason and certainly not an endorsement -- just to see what would happen when imitating that popular device.

Next, we chose five popular sites to run a simple test on: Amazon, Meebo, Samsung, Sony, and Verizon. (Again, no endorsement implied).

The outcome of our experiment is shown in this simple summary: Mobile Agent Test Page

As you can see from this page, in most cases the servers responded differently -- as you would expect -- when told to feed data to a mobile device. The side-by-side comparisons of the single response page show how different things are. For three of the five applications the size of the delivered data was < 20% of the full-size file.

Note that the page rendering appeared to be quite normal (except for total screen area). We didn't note any essential differences.

But not in every case. The Sony and Verizon mobile downloads are around 90% of the full-size download. We checked the actual content and found for these it appears there were some Flash items and also some movie items in what is sent to the mobile device.

One obvious implication is that this technique may be very valuable in using eValid to drive substantial loads into a server that is serving mobile applications. eValid's inherent scalability is what does the trick.

1 comment:

Redorange said...

Good content... thnx for sharing your knowledge.. being into feild i must say..coding these mobile applications is reallly crucial task and needs a lot of concentration and intelligence.... but after alll human mind is genius............. ;)