As mobile access to the web increases, it is becoming more and more important to ensure sites are usable on mobile devices. iPhoney attempts to address the iPhone camp with a desktop application that renders web pages within a virtual iPhone.

After playing around with the app, it is certainly not without its flaws. For one, it is not simulating a true iPhone client environment. This means there is still room for the possibility that pages will display differently on an actual device. The UI is also fairly limited, with the iPhone graphic surrounding the browser window being purely aesthetic with no functional purpose or clickable areas. It would also have been nice to be able to simulate different network speeds to see how pages loaded using typical 3G/HSDPA, EDGE, and GSM connnections.

The program does recreate an accurate pixel-for-pixel recreation of the browser window (320×240). It even lets you rotate the virtual phone sideways to view the page in “landscape” mode. It also does an excellent job of recreating the iPhone’s browser UI, which can be extremely useful for developers building sites that complement the iPhone’s UI appearence. Overall it makes aesthetic testing of a site extremely simple and straightforward, though is lacking in other areas like performance and browser testing. In the end it won’t replace the need for a real iPhone to properly test a site, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

Link: iPhoney Product Page