> The second part of my question is... Are there people/offices
>> at the various top level mobile phone manufactures (Sony Ericsson,
>> Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, etc.) that I can get in touch with about
>> getting some loaner mobile phones to use for our internal QA and
>> testing? They would be returned once we are complete with our site
>> testing... Is this a common practice? Or are the phones purchased?
As you can imagine, all the handset manufacturers have thousands of
developers (small and large) knocking at their doors for loaner handsets.
They aren't in a position to give out new model handsets because:
1) There aren't a whole lot of new handsets lying around to hand out to
developers
2) These handsets are understandably in high demand by retailers as well.
Typically only "priority" developers or developers with a long standing
relationship with the handset manufacturers can acquire loaner handsets.
I believe that Motorola has some kind of "loaner" program at the moment
but I'm not sure of the details.
The common industry practice is to just go out and purchase the handsets
yourself. (Yes - It'll cost a LOT of money). Which explains another
industry practise of only doing "QA" on a handful of handsets and then
assuming that it will work on a much wider set of handsets. I know mobile
game development companies that only ever test on TWO handsets!
This my experience around APAC only though. Maybe it's different in EU or
USA.
My advice is just to bite the bullet and spend the money to purchase the
handsets you need. You'll always need it in the future for regression
testing. I.e. Don't assume that a game tested on the Nokia 6600 will
smoothly run on 3650 and 7650.. I've seen them fail more than once.
Alex Young
Received on Fri Apr 16 05:03:00 2004