Preparing PhoneGap
Option 1: With Google Chrome and the Ripple Emulator
For starters, the easiest place to build and test our mobile application is with the Google Chrome web browser. The great folks over at PhoneGap have written a plugin for Chrome to test PhoneGap mobile applications right inside a web browser window. With the Ripple plugin for Chrome, we'll have an HTML inspector and Javascript console available to us! This is great for quickly getting started with writing code and testing a mobile application.
Using Google Chrome is a nice way to get our feet wet, however this doesn't give us the most accurate representation of our end user's experience. Since our users will be on their mobile device, we'll eventually want to test it on a real mobile device (option #2) before releasing it for download.
Option 2: With PhoneGap and a Mobile Device (or emulator)
To truly get a feel for the user experience of our mobile application, we need to test our app on an actual mobile device. Grab your nearest Android mobile phone or tablet, or snag the closest iPhone or iPad to get started.
We won't have the nice developer tools that are available in Google Chrome, but this gives us a true end user experience with our mobile application. If an Android or iOS device is not available, it is possible to build and test our mobile application through emulation on a computer (more info in the instructions linked above). This is a great way to get a close feel to the end user experience, without having to actually own a mobile device.