The Emulator will give you plenty of experience with what your app will run like on really slow hardware. :-( So I'd suggest skipping the common recommendation of getting a low end phone like a G1. Get something reasonably high end and recent. Almost anything decent and popular should do.
Having access to several devices might be beneficial if you're programming something like a game (where you might want to playtest on different size screens, etc.) or are otherwise pushing the UI envelope.
If you're doing basic productivity, social network, etc. apps (like todo lists, twitter clients, etc), then there really isn't going to be much different between different devices. If you follow the recommendations in the developer doc on handling multiple display densities, etc. then the platform really does a great job abstracting away any differences between different phones.
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The Emulator will give you plenty of experience with what your app will run like on really slow hardware. :-( So I'd suggest skipping the common recommendation of getting a low end phone like a G1. Get something reasonably high end and recent. Almost anything decent and popular should do.
Having access to several devices might be beneficial if you're programming something like a game (where you might want to playtest on different size screens, etc.) or are otherwise pushing the UI envelope.
If you're doing basic productivity, social network, etc. apps (like todo lists, twitter clients, etc), then there really isn't going to be much different between different devices. If you follow the recommendations in the developer doc on handling multiple display densities, etc. then the platform really does a great job abstracting away any differences between different phones.