Windows Mobile Emulators

Microsoft have long been releasing standalone emulators for the Pocket PC and Smartphone platforms: these are fully-functional, PC-based instances of the Windows Mobile ROM, without any of the usual customisations and additional software added by the network operators. I find them invaluable for troubleshooting customer’s issues with Server ActiveSync if I don’t have a device or active SIM card to hand, and are also very useful for taking screenshots to write technical articles with.

There are separate emulators for Pocket PC and for Smartphone, and they are also available in different language versions.

They are freely available from the Microsoft web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=06111A3A-A651-4745-88EF-3D48091A390B&displaylang=en

However, they do require that you have Visual Studio 2005 or later installed.

Once installed, they don’t actually appear to add any shortcuts to the Start Menu, so I find that to launch them you have to create a shortcut manually using the following commands:

For the Pocket PC emulator:

start "" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Device Emulator\1.0\DeviceEmulator.exe" "C:\Program Files\Windows Mobile 6 SDK\PocketPC\Deviceemulation\0409\PPC_USA_GSM_VR.BIN" /MemSize 128 /Skin "C:\Program Files\Windows Mobile 6 SDK\PocketPC\Deviceemulation\Pocket_PC_Phone\Pocket_PC_PE.xml" /VMName "Pocket PC 2006 Emulator"

For the Smartphone emulator:

start "" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Device Emulator\1.0\DeviceEmulator.exe" "C:\Program Files\Windows Mobile 6 SDK\Smartphone\Deviceemulation\0409\SP_USA_GSM_VR.bin" /MemSize 128 /Skin "C:\Program Files\Windows Mobile 6 SDK\Smartphone\Deviceemulation\smartphone\SmartPhone.xml" /VMName "Smartphone 2006 Emulator"

By altering the switches you can configure how much of your PCs memory is allocated to the virtual device, and you can also change the skin used. If you browse to the folder where the emulator files have been installed to, you will see a number of BIN files, these are the emulator images. By editing the bin file used by the emulator you can use devices that have no radio component, or devices that ‘believe’ that they are already connected to a fictitious GPRS network.

Because Pocket PC devices are touch screen, the emulator can be operated using the mouse. However, as Smartphone devices are not touchscreen, the keyboard must be used. The two Soft Keys are operated by pressing the F1 and F2 keys.

A good article on using and configuring the emulators can be found here:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/09/17/447033.aspx

Happy emulating!