Engadget got to take a cool tour of Nokia’s R&D lab at San Diego, just off of Scripps Poway Parkway. The section of the lab demonstrated in the above video is to test the lifetime of devices and quality of manufacturing.

First they take either engineering prototypes or production models, then they put these functional devices through several tests to simulate a product’s lifetime of abuse. Years worth of abuse is conducted in tests that last from a couple hours to several weeks.

What kind of abuse can these devices expect?

“by pressing buttons, sliding sliders, actuating hinges, heating, cooling, wetting, drying, dropping, whacking, shaking, rubbing, bending, and generally defacing the phones in every way imaginable.”

Chris Ziegler, Engadget

OK, the phone is broken, now what? Well, they check for the obvious reasons first (the LCD is no longer attached to the body…). However, if the obvious eludes the team, they’re fully equipped with a scanning electron microscope and a CT scanner. 3 dimensional problem analysis! Fun!

As much as all this smashing and microscoping must be “fun”, the interesting part is how all this R&D is actually very useful. This process allows the R&D team to find broken connections on the actual chipsets, incorrectly fabbed components. Imperfections, components that are prone to break… Whatever problems they find with the engineering of the device, it can be corrected. I always wondered how my Nokia 3220 lasted for so many years across all that abuse… now I know.