How It Works

How does this thing work, anyway?

How does TryPhone work? Simple … sort of. TryPhone is built on top of the technology that powers our award–winning service for mobile developers, DeviceAnywhere (click here to read more about DeviceAnywhere).

What exactly is this awesome technology, anyway? Glad you asked. We call it Direct–To–Device™. Basically, Direct–To–Device employs a unique combination of hardware and software that connects directly to mobile handsets. Our users can then control these handsets via software over the Internet – essentially remotely operating physical handsets.

So, all of the handsets you see on our Web site have been poked, prodded and picked apart in real life – and then hooked up to a server and sent over the Internet for real, live use… just as if users held the devices in their hands. Pretty cool, huh?

But you're not a developer… so why do you need this real–life phone? You don't. For the tens of millions of mobile users across the globe, we needed to develop something a little more practical while still using our innovative technology. So, we came up with something really cool…

…which we decided to call Virtual–Device(tm) technology.

This is where things get really interesting. First, we built a crawler (kinda like a Web crawler) that automatically creeps through a Direct–To–Device connected handset – mapping out the entire user interface of the device. Every nook and cranny of every one of our devices has been explored, tested, and mapped out to create exact replicas of the phones – from every letter on the keypads to the ins and outs of all of the applications. Think of it like a massive tree: the branches represent the button sequences a user would have to press to navigate through a certain path, while the leaves symbolize the various screens that a user would see throughout the navigation.

But we didn't stop there! We then created a cutting–edge Web renderer that is able to deliver this massive phone map via HTML by leveraging the latest in Web 2.0 technologies out there. The result: fully interactive virtual phones accessible through your Web browser!

To break it down:

• This is a one–of–a–kind technology that provides Web–based, fully interactive handsets.
• Each virtual handset – sometimes also referred to as a "phone simulator" – is an actual recording (for lack of a better word) of a physical device. No, it is not an "intelligent" emulator, but it shows you exactly how the phone works – as well as its user interface, applications and services. In short, it shows you the phone "as–built" versus "as–designed."

Easy, right? Maybe the technology isn't – but test–driving our phones sure is.

Remember, the goal of TryPhone is to show you how things REALLY work (not how they were designed to work) – without marketing hype – to help you make a better, more informed purchasing decision.