An Exclusive Look at Reliability Labs, Where Google Stress Tests Pixel Hardware
Smartphones are durable, Powerful devices that we wear everywhere. They improve a bit every year too. Whether thanks to improved glass technology that is more to the tiny and test test, or to screen size adjustments to ensure the best experience in your hand.
Take the Pixel 10 Pro, for example, for example. It is now classified ip68 for water And Dust resistance, as are most concovisible flagship phones. Barely a few years ago, the hinge mechanism on folding phones still had problems with dust, and even the last Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 is only IP48, which means that it is not as Dust resistant as a pixel.
Telephone manufacturers carry out a battery of tests on their devices constantly throughout the development cycle – sometimes more than a year even before the product is released. Google invited me to its head office in Mountain View, California, to consult one of these test centers, nicknamed Labs Labs. It is an indefinable building on the Google campus, but inside there are new generation pixel phones and smart watches that are plummeted, abandoned and even frozen to measure their global sustainability. (Google paid part of my travel costs to see its research center.)
The folding test
Photography: Julian Chokkattu
You have probably seen a test like this with other folding smartphones. The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is fixed to this machine, which folds up and continuously deploys the device, and this allows telephone manufacturers to say that their device can withstand 250,000 or 500,000 folds, offering a little more peace of mind for the reliability of the hinge. This is only one machine to test, but Google says that it has several of them in Asia, folding and unfolding preproduction units.
Google claims that the new Pixel 10 Pro Poly can withstand more than 10 years of folding, or 200,000 folds for the hinge. Samsung claims 500,000 folds for the Galaxy Z Fold7. (If you fold the phone 100 times a day – which is excessive – there are 365,000 folds after 10 years.) But the demand of more than 10 years of Google does not only concern the hinge. The new design without gear of the Pixel 10 Pro Fold allows more space so that the flexion screen, putting less voltage on the screen, and there are several new layers of reinforcement to support the display. This means that the display and the hinge should last a decade.
Scratch and wear tests
Photography: Julian Chokkattu
Then there are a few wear tests. The first was a mannequin arm carrying the Pixel 4 watch, bolted on a robot arm that was moving back and forth. The watch group was based on a piece of wood, and the test measured how well the strap behaved well during friction against the material. (It is easy to switch the material against which he strikes himself with something else, like a metal sheet.) It is a Google surface abrasion test to test new types of straps for his smart watches; A pressure sensor applies a coherent force for precise measurements.
