SOUTHWOOD, England – Breaking phones is all well and good, but it’s finding out where, and how, faults occur as a result that builds reliability. Obvious physical breakages are easy to spot – a chipped casing here, a furled keypad there, but what happens when those cracks appear on one of the gates in a silicon chip? Or one of the myriad components on the numerous circuit boards inside a phone comes apart? That’s where the reliability labs analysis department comes into play. Resembling a science lab the place is packed with microscopes, and xray machine and a scanning electron microscope, which uses liquid nitrogen to clear the air before scanning, so no unwanted particles get scanned.
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SOUTHWOOD, England – In the final part of our series on testing (though we still have analysis to do) we take a look at stress tests. I tend to keep my phone in my front left pocket. That way I always know where it is (alongside my keys) and if I don’t feel it there, I know it’s missing so I naturally look for it. Some people though, keep it in their back pockets. I’m not sure why. But Nokia has a test for it.
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SOUTHWOOD, England – Kevin Smith, reliability labs team leader, jokes that he gets a new pair of jeans every month. Not because he’s hard on jeans, simply because the old ones get strapped to a machine designed to test phones. The test is one I’d never imagined taking place, but I’m pretty glad it does. It simulates what happens when owners rub their phone on their jeans to give the screen a quick clean. Yep, I do it, and I bet you do too.
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SOUTHWOOD, England – Depending on the type of use, some devices can have their keys pressed over one million times during their lifetime. Which is why the team in the Nokia Reliability Labs have machines that can relentlessly tap out 1 million dabs on a keypad. Tucked away in the back of the labs is a little room, no bigger than the average kitchen where the tut tut tut of pneumatic-powered metal fingers jab away at keypads, d-pads and on and off switches.
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SOUTHWOOD, England – Breaking phones is all well and good, but it’s finding out where, and how, faults occur as a result that builds reliability. Obvious physical breakages are easy to spot – a chipped casing here, a furled keypad there, but what happens when those cracks appear on one of the gates in a silicon chip? Or one of the myriad components on the numerous circuit boards inside a phone comes apart? That’s where the reliability labs analysis department comes into play. Resembling a science lab the place is packed with microscopes, and xray machine and a scanning electron microscope, which uses liquid nitrogen to clear the air before scanning, so no unwanted particles get scanned.
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