Sony Ericsson Tour: Part I

Editorial by Michael Oryl on Monday October 18, 2004.

I think everybody assumes that a lot of testing goes into the development of a new mobile phone, but my guess is that people don't really grasp just how much so. Sony Ericsson USA was kind enough to invite me to take a tour of their testing labs in their Research Triangle Park headquarters in North Carolina. There they showed me a lot of the processes that go on behind the scenes.

First up, a rather practical testing environment. Everybody needs to know how well a phone will work while driving, right? Well, Sony Ericsson thinks so too. To that end, they have placed half of a 1992 Mercury Cougar in their offices for the express purpose of testing out car kits and handsets in as close to a real world driving scenario that you can get inside a lab environment.

The idea was to duplicate both the acoustic properties of a car and the associated road noise. The acoustics part is handled by the car interior itself, the road noise is supplied through a set of speakers that play a road noise recording. You can see one of the speakers in the photo below; it is the black box in the foot well of the car, where the gas and brake pedals would normally be located.

The piece of paper taped to the steering wheel is a set of standard test phrases they repeat when testing various handsets and hands free devices.

Half of a 1992 Mercury Cougar, used for audio testing