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Tech

How to Torture a Smartphone

Motherboard recently visited Verizon’s device testing lab in suburban New Jersey to better understand the stresses smartphones undergo before reaching consumers.
Testing to ensure background noise doesn't ruin your calls. Image: Evan Rodgers/Motherboard

With smartphone growth slowing in the US, wireless carriers are now falling over themselves to convince their competitors' customers to switch providers. This has taken the form of aggressive pricing, novel data-consumption schemes, and, in Verizon's case, continued claims of network superiority. Did you see its recent commercial with all those colorful balls?

To that end, Verizon invited Motherboard earlier this week to its Device Evaluation Lab about an hour west of New York City to see the kinds of tests the company subjects smartphones to before they're certified to run on the network. Such labs aren't unique to Verizon, of course, but how often do you get to see smartphones purposefully smashed in the interest of science?

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"We are the gatekeepers protecting the consumers using our network," said Device Evaluation Lab Director Sam Oommen, who explained that the lab's purpose is to ensure that smartphones and tablets meet Verizon's strict guidelines before they're allowed anywhere near the company's network. Testing takes about four weeks to complete, Oommen said.

Zapping a battery with tiny jolts of static electricity to make sure they don't explode in your pocket. Image: Evan Rodgers/Motherboard

The tests cover a wide range of issues, including ensuring that voice calls can seamlessly transition from the company's LTE network to a Wi-Fi network; that batteries don't explode when subjected to wear and tear and electrical shocks; that loud background noise (say, the sounds of people grabbing after work beers in a packed bar) isn't heard on the other end of the conversation; and that falls from a height of one meter off the ground don't result in a mess of broken glass and shattered dreams.

Van Treuren about to drop a phone. Image: Evan Rodgers/Motherboard

"What we do is called accelerated life testing," explained Verizon engineer Erik Van Treuren. "We're simulating, as best as we can, the actual mechanical stresses that are going to be on the device during the course of its lifetime for the customer."

As Van Treuren explained, devices are dropped 100 times to ensure that they don't suffer "catastrophic" damage the minute they inevitably slip out of the owner's hands. "Minor cosmetic scratches are tolerable for the customer but major issues, whether it's screen cracking—which is not as common as you might thinks—or issues with the radios" are not acceptable, he said.

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Also unacceptable: background noise bleeding into voice calls.

Outside the sound isolation testing chamber. Image: Evan Rodgers/Motherboard

"We want to make sure that noise is filtered out when somebody is speaking," "When somebody is speaking we want to be able to see if the device is able to filter out unwanted background," said Dr. Sherif Sherif, a senior manager at the Device Evaluation Lab. Sherif explained that Verizon uses Harvard sentences—nonsensical sentences that contain a wide variety of English language sounds—to test the sensitivity of the device's microphones in noisy environments (above). "The task that Verizon has is to guarantee that your speech will be understood at the other end" of the conversation, he said.

This manikin emulates the size, shape, and capacity of the average human head to simulate device performance in the real world. Image: Evan Rodgers/Motherboard

Verizon's eagerness to show off its rigorous testing should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to how things are shaking out in the wireless market. According to a recent Cisco report about global wireless data consumption, mobile video now accounts for more than half of all mobile data consumed worldwide. Verizon's pitch, then, is easy to digest: It may not be the cheapest carrier around—I personally get by on a $30 per month T-Mobile plan—but when there's YouTube to be watched you'll appreciate the robustness of its testing.