B-r-r, Z-a-p: Cell Phones’ Chamber of Horrors

The men in polo shirts don’t look angry.

But here in an underground chamber they are frying, pounding, dropping, squashing, freezing and otherwise whaling away on one of the world’s most beloved gadgets.

Officially this is Motorola Inc.’s main accelerated-life-testing laboratory, where the world’s No. 2 maker of cellular phones tests many of its new products.

To the 30 engineers, lab technicians and testers who work here, it is a “medieval torture chamber,” where abuse of the company’s products is the order of the day . . . after day . . . after day.

“Making things is fun, and breaking things is fun too,” joked Ken Wasko, director of engineering quality at the plant for Motorola, which is based in another Chicago suburb, Schaumburg.

Quips aside, product abuse is serious business. It is places like Libertyville where a heated competition is being waged to meet the world’s growing cell-phone demands.

Mobiles are getting smaller, lighter and more multifunctional as the industry moves toward a generation of phones that are as good for Internet use as they are for talking.

Although they may be smarter, the newest phones aren’t capable of preventing their users from dropping them in toilets, leaving them in furnace-hot parked cars or forgetting them on top of SUVs, where they will fly onto the highway at 60 mph.

That’s where the torture center comes in.

When it comes to testing for durability, the company is confident it’s as thorough as Nokia, Ericsson or any other competitor for the abuse it heaps on the gadgets.

“No place on earth would you find these conditions,” proclaimed John Gervasio, who oversees the lab as manager of reliability engineering.

He referred to the range of temperatures phones are subjected to --from a low of minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit to a high of 185.

But he could easily have been talking about the array of tests that age a cell phone three to seven years within days.

Each phone is dropped “at least hundreds” of times, product testers revealed, from varying but undisclosed heights, and by humans and machines, onto steel, tile and concrete. High-speed cameras digitally record the falls for slow-motion playback.

Nearby, 32 phones at a time are loaded into a giant blue oven. Later, they will be frozen.

Behind a door marked “Dust Room,” dust is blasted onto boxes of phones sitting inside a 5-square-foot machine.

Not just any dust--grated, fine-grained dust from the Arizona desert that costs Motorola $30 per one-gallon jar.

Further on, a “sun machine” blasts the phones with ultraviolet rays to simulate solar ones, making sure the mobiles don’t turn green.

Vibrator machines rattle them hard in separate soundproof rooms --one for vertical shaking, the other horizontal.

A mechanical shock machine gives the phones just that.

Keypads get worked over in another area. A robot arm pounds keys over and over.

Other machines test to make sure the pads can withstand the digs of fingernails.

There are machines that simulate bouncy truck rides, that bend and yank antennas, slam the phones’ covers shut and bend them.

There’s even a machine devised with more rotund users in mind. In the squeeze test, a round rubber pad squashes phones endlessly, simulating what happens in the all-too-common event of phones’ contact with derrieres.

The whole process can be disturbing to those who design the devices. Sometimes, Gervasio recounted with relish, a young engineer would come down to the center and complain, “Why are you putting my product through this environment?”

There’s some consolation for those engineers: Rival companies’ new phones are occasionally put through the same process.

Once all the abuse is completed, damage is reviewed using infrared cameras in the Failure Analysis Room.

If inspectors don’t find damage with the scanning acoustic microscopy, they’ll track it with the atomic absorption spectrameter. Or maybe the differential scanning calorimeter.

Considering that they weigh as little as three ounces, cell phones are remarkably sturdy--tougher than computer notebooks, PCs or other larger items.