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A Visual Look at the Nokia Damage Test Labs
Posted by Adrian Covert at 6:00 AM on November 21, 2008
I've long suspected that the best job ever would be to work in product stress testing—because you basically get paid to break shit all day. Nokia sent over a bunch of info detailing how their test centres operate, leaving me fully convinced this would indeed be my dream gig. Not only do they run over 200 mechanical tests on these things, but where else could you play with a bunch of machines that bend, bake, humidify, spray, poke and drop phones? (And yeah, that phone in the picture above just got poked a million times...literally.)
You probably only read Consumer Reports if a) you are at your grandparents house or b) you are a grandparent yourself. But that's too bad, because tucked quietly away in the NYC suburb of Yonkers lies one of the biggest and best electronics testing labs money can buy. And what goes on here at Consumer Reports main test facility probably puts most other tech pubs to shame.
Everyone knows how much of a bunglefart the "Certified for Windows Vista" sticker was in determining whether computers worked OK or completely lousily with Vista. Microsoft doesn't want to repeat this, which is why they're telling hardware manufacturers to start testing their products with Windows 7 as soon as the first beta is out, unless they don't want to qualify for Microsoft's new Windows 7 compatibility sticker. Microsoft's going to check up on them too, making sure companies' current Windows Vista submission "include a complete CPK with test logs from Windows 7." [
Trusted Reviews has a big investigation on inkjet printers and inkjet ink, and their year-long study comparing fading between more expensive manufacturer brand vs. the cheaper crappy brand shows that you get what you pay for. Over three months, the differences between the two were negligible, with pages only fading slightly (but noticeably) in quality.
The new Macbook Pro is not much of a bump up from its predecessors, but it is a step in the right direction. The addition of Multi-Touch is a great new feature, even on a touchpad that's smaller than the one on the Air. However, the Penryn-powered processor in this MBP is running at roughly the same speed as the last generation's chips, GHz to GHz, and give no good reason to upgrade from machines that are less than a year old. The most interesting point here is the boost in efficiency the now-pervasive LED backlighting and 45nm Penryn chips bring to the MacBook Pro, which together give an hour extra battery life over older models with CCFL screens and 65nm CPU technology. That makes this the most efficient Macbook Pro yet.
A team of Danish researchers has discovered a way of dating dead bodies via the corpse's eye using a nuclear particle accelerator. The procedure, which measures the amount of a carbon isotope in the eye lens, has been made possible because of atomic weapons testing half a century ago. The technique only works for people born after 1950 and will only be valid until levels of the carbon isotype have returned to normal—probably 100 years. Here's how it works.
