Android

I have been debating fiddling wither win7 or android.

What is a good android phone to test/develop with? Is the nexus still the best choice?

You can start hacking Android without a phone. The emulator is just cool :-)

The emulator is a dog. Compared to the iPhone anyways.

It's useless for web development.

How many platforms does the iPhone emulator run on? Is it instrumentable and controllable by user applications using nothing but sockets and octets? Didn't think so :-)

Android emulator is slow to start, but it's cross-platform, and allows for hot-updating.

I have just about completely ditched the android emulator because it is irritatingly slow and I'm constantly finding it with its pants down trying to talk to eclipse. At our company we've also found that it doesn't give an accurate idea of how readable the text is in your interface, or how easy it is to interact with, partly because it's just too big on the screen and partly because it's sluggish.

It is at its most useful when I want to pull a file from internal storage, which often isn't possible on a device, or when I don't have a device handy, in which case it is a passable solution. It's never, ever my first choice, though.

I use the emulator for continuous integration. Its really helpful for unit- and integration-testing. Combine it with Robotium and you can thoroughly test you application across screen sizes and Android OS Versions.