Behind the scenes at the Nokia Test Centre

20 November 2008 1:14 GMT / By Stuart Miles

In a quiet business park in Farnborough, engineer Kevin Smith goes to work everyday with one objective: to break stuff.

"It we fail to break it, we've failed in our task", says the man whose job it is to break Nokia phones for a living.

Smith's main task day-in day-out is to help test Nokia handsets to destruction so by the time the public get their hands on them there should be little to go wrong.

"We currently have around 200 tests that if we tested on a handset back to back would take around 5 years to complete. This is everything from button pressing to weather testing", Smith tells us as he begins to explain his job.

Of course it doesn't take 5 years but, testing samples of around 300-500 handsets at a time, around 8 weeks if they were to go through the complete process in one hit. The massive reduction in time is down to the testing department working hand-in-hand with the designers in the building next door right from the beginning of the design process. Before a model has even been made Kevin and his merry band of destroyers are breaking stuff in simulated experiments on the computer screen.

"We test everything from simulating it being dropped to dust getting into the phone to even extreme temperatures and humidity", says Smith. "After all a customer could buy a phone anywhere and then go anywhere. There is nothing to say that they won't just stay in the country they bought it in."

That need to make the phone a global "go anywhere" product has meant that all Nokia phones go through the same rigorous process in 11 test centres around the world.

What does that entail? Being baked in 85 degrees Celsius heat, being frozen in -40 degrees Celsius cold, withstanding humidity levels up to 95% and then having to deal with corrosion, rain, and sunlight and that's just the weather room.

Get further into the testing centre and you really start to realise that Smith's mantra of "wanting to break stuff" isn't just a slogan they put on the wall: he really means it.

The drop chamber sees phones dropped from a large height over and over again 5 hours at a time all while being captured on a £50,000 high-speed video camera capable of shooting 100,000 frames per second.

A test to see how rubbing the screen on your jeans is yet another test Smith and his men do. Then there is the abrasion test that is designed to simulate keys and coins in your pockets - just 5 hours of jingling and jangling rather than your run to the station.

Our personal favourite? The tension and strain of a phone being sat on repeatedly by the equivalent of a 15 stone man, and that's before the twist machine gets to work.

If the phone stands up to the rigours of the above, then the robots and engineers get to work trying to break the buttons, switches, sockets and sliding parts. Button pushing, shutter sliding, d-pad toggling, you name it, they do it, constantly checking the results to see when and how it breaks.

To monitor the results, recordings are captured every 30 minutes. At the end the phone or part - Kevin is currently testing products on the market as well as phones that won't be announced for another 8 months - is then encapsulated into a resin and then studied further under the microscope or X-ray machine or even an energy dispersive X-ray spectroscope, used for the elemental analysis of materials, a process that uses electrons and X-rays to check for defects or areas that could be improved.

If you thought all the above tests would be enough? You would be wrong. Smith then puts it through what he claims is the toughest test of all: the gorilla test.

No, it's not a trip to London Zoo, but him and his engineers trying their best to break it with their bare hands.

"Can we get a fingernail in there? What happens if we pull on this bit hard enough?" Smith tells us reenacting the process with a phone he has pulled out of his shirt pocket. "When that's done we then normally give it to my 2-year-old to start bashing stuff with."

The result hopes Smith, is a phone, regardless of whether it's the latest N96 or something that's a little older, that won't break in your hands when you get it out of the box.

"We are the CSI of Nokia", one of Smith's colleagues tells us as our tour of the facility nears to an end. "Our job is to find out why it doesn't work so we can make better phones that last."