Test our Mobile Website from Desktop with Opera Mobile Classic Emulator

Developing a good template for a website is no longer as easy as it once was. Now, we have to consider, not only the classic desktop view for our website, but also the mobile layout for both smartphones and tablets.

We are not simply talking of differents display resolution issues but we need to consider the idea of develop an ad hoc template for mobile devices.

The aim of this post is not to explain how to create a template for mobile sites (I suggested a nice way to produce WordPress themes here) but to introduce a nice free multiplatform tool focused on testing mobile templates and layouts from desktop.

Opera Mobile Classic Emulator, in my opinion, is the best tool to test the layout of our mobile site without using real mobile devices of heavy Android emulators.

It simply consists on a desktop version of the well-known Opera Mobile app for mobile devices.

Opera Mobile Classic Emulator enable us to choose different resolutions for both phones and tablets using a profile selector. It let us to set resolution, pixel density, user interface and more.

Moreover, it’s possible to link Opera Mobile Classic Emulator to Opera Dragonfly for mobile CSS deveopment, JS and performance debugging.

You can download it for Windows, Linux (you may find it on some external repositories too) and Mac OS X from here.