Mobile device emulator

All Nokia SDK's for Series 40 and Symbian include an emulator that simulates the mobile device hardware and operating system on your workstation. The emulator enables you to develop and test your MIDlets on your workstation before testing on actual devices.

The emulator provides as faithful an emulation as possible of the OS running on target hardware, and has processes and scheduling that are almost identical to those on a real device. However, there are necessarily some differences between the emulator and actual mobile devices, so testing MIDlets on target devices remains an important part of the development cycle.

Figure: Nokia N97 emulator

You can integrate the Series 40 or Symbian emulator into both Eclipse and NetBeans IDEs, so that you can launch your currently developed MIDlet directly into the emulator. You do not need to restart the emulator for every debug session. You can leave the emulator running, rebuild the debugged application from the IDE and launch the application from the Installed folder in the emulator.

You can also open MIDlets (File > Open) directly from the emulator, in which case they are 'installed' onto the emulator in a similar manner as the installation is done on actual devices. The emulator is also able to open image files, MMS files, web pages, and other supported file formats. These files are opened in their respective applications. An image is opened in the default image viewer of the device, for example.

For more information, see the following sections:

• Simulating events

• Diagnostics window