For me, that "dongle" is a ~$70 prepaid android phone (a Huawei L8180). I strongly doubt any low volume developer aimed hardware could be built and sold for much less than that...

I figured it was important to test on a low end phone, right? ( see how I nicely justified my cheapness there?) The downside to that plan was the jQuery Mobile bug that only showed up on top end devices (now the Huawei has a Galaxy S2 siting next to it...)

That's exactly the purpose for which I bought the Nexus S, the Nexus One, and the HTC G1.

They are the Google Reference devices. Admittedly, it's perhaps not as lean as what you're referring to, but as a testing sandbox, I've tried a lot of different phones, but nothing has worked as well, in a general sense, as the reference models.

I ended up buying the popular phones (HTC Desire HD, Samsung Galaxy S2, etc.) just for testing, I'm on iOS myself.

But just working from (non reference) phones is dangerous too, it's so annoying to implement the volume controls with a BroadcastReceiver for the ACTION_MEDIA_BUTTON Intent (works great on Motorola's), but fails on HTC, and you should just override onKeyUp()... all (Android) phones behave differently, and not only in (screen) specs. Samsung Galaxy S (<2.2) is notorious in not following the Android specs, for example it shows the versionCode instead of versionName to the user [http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/versioning.htm...] and if you do some (proxy) audio stream playback there is the [http://google.com/search?q=PVMFMemoryBufferReadDataStreamImp...] error with no real solutions...

The problem is, in the end, it should work on the popular devices, not the 'perfect' Android reference phones..

Thanks for the insight. I personally have yet to have any issues running on any devices, but most of what I'm doing is internal to our company and doesn't have a very large user base. Also, our code is pretty standalone from the OS itself.

Regardless, there's always going to be the issue of supporting multiple devices, but I have found that if I develop in the 'perfect' environment first, it speeds development time considerably. It's akin to web development against standards. I feel very sorry for the developers (if there are any left, this used to be accepted practice) who developed for Internet Explorer, and then had to cobble in "support" for other browsers. In much the same vain, it's easier to work against the best possible outcome, and then revisit your code for the edge cases.

I don't know, or have any numbers to know whether or not the Galaxy S2 is 'edge' or not, as I'm guessing it's quite popular. :-\ Sorry.

Android has been ported to the BeagleBoard, so half of that is already available. However, I don't know whether Android's GUI can run over X11/VNC or similar.