Have you ever wondered about the testing your BlackBerry device has undergone before it was released for sale? How RIM ensures the smartphone meets the high standard expected by the likes of you and me?
Well, wonder no more. Thanks to Ryan, a Hardware Engineering Technician in the Hardware Support Lab at RIM, we can share some of the testing details with you.
In a nutshell, this team is responsible for ensuring each and every BlackBerry phone is tough and performs well. As Ryan puts it, this basically means “we try to break them so that you, #TeamBlackBerry, would be hard pressed to do the same.”
RIM wants to make sure that your smartphone can cope with life’s knocks. No matter if you accidentally drop your BlackBerry, spill your cup of tea over it or encounter some other mishap, your handset should survive.
So how does RIM toughen your BlackBerry? “Well, we drop them, bend them, shock them, soak them and zap them…a lot. We also do some nerdy things like reading digital signals to make sure everything is speaking the right language”.
One of the tests your BlackBerry phone has undergone is the “Moisture Ingress Test”. This involves RIM dropping a smartphone – in the case of the video, above – a BlackBerry Curve 9360, into a bucket of water. The water has a dye in it which shows if water has entered. The team then checks the phone to ensure all its functions and features are working as normal.
There is also Drop Testing, which, as you’ve likely guessed, is the team dropping the smartphones, over and over again – in fact, “hundreds of times”. Using high-speed cameras, the team films each drop so they can assess how well the hardware copes with the knock.
Take a look at the video below and see if you can spot the impact wave sent up the side of the Curve phone as a result of being dropped. Apparently, this is what it should do – “by allowing the device to bend, we are able to absorb the shock from the concrete into the plastic… just like a shock absorber on a car!”
Other tests the team carry out include bending a BlackBerry, to make sure it is tough enough to cope in case you sit on your phone, and keypad tests which consist of the keys being pressed “literally millions of times” to ensure they can cope with all your messaging demands!
Take a look at a BlackBerry undergoing a Bend and Flex Test, in the video below. And don’t forget to share your thoughts on this with us – just how tough is your BlackBerry smartphone?
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