Emulation tools for Qt SDK

Aim to test your applications by running them on a Harmattan device. However, the Qt SDK offers you two additional options to run applications without the actual device.

You can consider at least the following differences when selecting your emulation tool. When you run your application:

• in Qt Simulator, which is part of Qt Creator, it is compiled for the x86 processor architecture used on the development host.
• in the Harmattan emulator (QEMU), it is cross-compiled similarly for the ARM processor architecture of the device.

Qt Simulator

Qt Simulator is a fast and lightweight simulator for Qt applications aimed for Nokia devices. It does not emulate the device hardware and Harmattan platform, but is well suited for prototyping and simple applications.

Note: Qt Simulator only supports Qt and Qt Mobility APIs.

QEMU

QEMU offers full hardware-level emulation, which makes it more resource-intensive to run, but enables more accurate testing, debugging and layout design features. QEMU is not included in the Qt SDK installation by default, but you can update the Qt SDK with the Harmattan emulator target.

If you want to run your application in a system environment that emulates the device hardware, or your application uses Harmattan-specific APIs, use QEMU. Furthermore, if you need to check how your application responds to hardware changes, such as those mentioned above, you need to use QEMU.

For more information, see Using QEMU with Qt SDK.