MobileComplete, the guys who set up internetworked, remote-controlled cellphones for easy mobile-app testing over the web, created countless graphical phone mockups to embed in their developer's programming kit. Now they're letting anyone play with them, pitching web-based replicas as the best way to shop for phones you can't test in person.
Naming the service Tryphone, it takes the fast, elegant user-friendliness of real hardware and replicates it in slow, crufty web 2.0-tastic form. It's a neat idea, but the beta Tryphones don't work too well: it is immediately obvious that it should have been done in Flash rather than trying to reproduce stuff like the iPhone as HTML, with every button and icon a glorified IFRAME link.
Still, it's ahead of its time and could be the seed of something explosive: showing the experience instead of telling you marketing-driven technical specs. I think they're onto something.
Product Page [TryPhone]
