Emulator vs Phone which one to rely on?

I am almost done with my app..when i run it on the emulator ,at certain points, it is very slow and what i see is undesirable..when I run the same on my phone (xperia X8) it works fine. I really tried understanding why this is happening but of no avail! What should I do now? run some more tests and try optimizing or just release it in the market? Is what I am se开发者_运维技巧eing expected? Any info will be appreciated

You really should buy as many Android phones as you can. You definitely should have one with a physical keyboard, one slate phone, and one for the lowest API you are supporting. Personally, I have G1, Droid, and Nexus S that I test my apps on. Its so much faster than the emulator and easier to use. Its also a better metric of how your app works due to it being on actual hardware.

The emulator will always be slower than a real device (most likely, slower than any real device), so don't worry too much about it.

However, due to it's slowness, it can highlight areas where you may want to spend some time optimising your code that you may not necessarily find on your hardware. This is especially true on portable devices with limited CPU power, resources, and electrical power available.

It may be worth trying to find out what is causing the slowdowns in the emulator - if it's regular enough and accompanied by (for example) high CPU usage, then while a physical device may handle it better, you may find that you are unnecessarily consuming battery power and your users may not thank you for that.

The emulator is generally much slower than a physical device, so it's not a problem with your application. As long as it runs well on your phone it should be fine.

I agree with everything dbaugh said. At least at the time of this writing, the emulator is of limited use. Google has acknowledged the limitations of the current emulator and indicated they are working to revamp it. But until that happens. Stick to hardware testing.