Mobile browser simulator for finger gestures?

Question

I am looking for a light-weight mobile browser simulator that runs under Windows XP and allows me to test JavaScript touch and gesture events, such as zoom or drag and drop:

http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/touch/examples/dragdrop/

So far I have evaluated:

• MobiOne Studio's Test Center (iPhone)

• Keynote's MITE

• PhoneGap Simulator

It looks like MobiOne is the only one of these that supports finger gestures, and actually quite well.

However, before shelling out the $99.95 for MobiOne, I'd like to know: Are there any alternatives?

Note that I'm not interested in installing the Android SDK since it runs extremely slow on my machine. The Palm Pre SDK runs much faster, but it's still rather heavy-weight.

Answer 1

Currently, as of 2013

I use BrowserStack from the comfort of a web browser, which also runs on Windows XP. BrowserStack offers various emulators, and - as they run on their hardware - the client computer doesn't need to be powerful. Only, of course, one needs a decent Internet connection.

Previous suggestion, as of 2011

Seems like MobiOne Studio's Test Center is the only light-weight browser simulator that is half-way decent. Although there are issues. Some that I noticed:

• Touch events aren't emulated perfectly. For example mouse hovering works, which makes no sense.

• It doesn't support HTML5 video playback.

Alternatives such as the simulator included in the Android SDK are - as I wrote in my original post - extremely resource hungry.

Note, that I am still looking for suggestions. If there is a good one, I would be happy to make it the accepted answer.

Update: I just figured out that Android-x86 and the included browser run quite snappy on old hardware, in a VMware virtual machine. However, I doubt that there is support for emulating multi touch using an ordinary mouse.