This is how your smartphone is made
It's all very well sniping from the sidelines when a new phone comes out. It's too big, too plasticky, too Apple-y... most of us are guilty of shirking a handset without thinking about the months, sometimes years, of R&D that's packed into every device - from the cheapest feature phones to the most premium of handsets.
To learn a little more about how a phone is made, TechRadar visited Lenovo's main handset factory in Wuhan, China, and saw first-hand what goes into making the most popular gadget around - the smartphone.
Lenovo's factory in Wuhan is a recently opened state-of-the-art facility whose nearby neighbour is Foxconn - the company behind the manufacturing of Apple goods.
Currently the factory makes 20 million mobile devices a year, which is around 1.7 million a month. This is set to change soon, though.
Lenovo recently acquired Motorola and it is likely production of tablets and phones under the Moto brand will shift to Wuhan. Given the factory has the ability to produce 100 million mobile devices a year, it has more than enough in reserve to take this manufacturing feat on.
Currently there are 3,000 people working at the factory but its total capacity is around 8,000. And in the factory the workers assemble but don't actually create the motherboards or plastic.
This is because Lenovo took the decision around 10 years ago to outsource the fabrication side of the business and saved itself a lot of money in the process.
Leader of the pack
On our tour we were shown the various stages a phone goes through before it is packaged up and shipped off around the world.
Production in the factory was split on to two levels. The upper level housed what's called SMT (surface mount technology) and all of the testing that select handsets go through. On the ground floor was the assembly area - where most things were done by hand.
This was definitely a factory that proves robots aren't quite ready to take over manual work just yet. Speaking to the factory foreman, he revealed that workers assembling things by hand worked best as robots would be far too costly to install.
There was one that we spotted, though. Shaped like a Roomba, this robot helper's job was to bring batches of motherboards back and forth on a set path.
Once the robot brings the motherboards, which makes up the heart of the mobile phone, they are then barcode scanned in batches of four.
The boards are then passed to a picker and placer whose job it is to take components from a flow of tape and add these bits and bobs to the motherboard.
To make sure that this is a smooth process, there is also someone on hand to make sure the tape that houses the chips doesn't run out and that the right components are made available to the picker and placer. When the components are all in place, the motherboard is then 'baked'.
This process was all done on the upper floor of the factory - we had to venture downstairs to see the handset actually take shape.
Going downstairs: packing and testing
Downstairs was where the packing took place. We watched as the freshly assembled motherboard was packed into a plastic casing and then tested to make sure the electronic components of the phone worked as they should. Each phone goes through a process called multi-function testing.
This tests a handset's touchscreen, GPS, ariel and sound quality. These are then packed and another Roomba-like robot takes the handsets away for shipping.
Testing times
As you would expect in any factory, this is a seamless process. In total, the SMT and testing took around 30 minutes and then there was a further 10 minutes for final assembly. In all there are 34 people that have a part to play in the assembling of every single handset (and let's not forget that one robot).
There were many other areas of the vast factory that we visited (and many others that were completely out of bounds). Perhaps the most interesting, though, was where more intensive phone testing took place. Spot testing is done on one handset in every 10,000 units and these handsets are put through some hefty rigmarole.
Some examples we saw included a room which acts as a Faraday cage. In it housed a massive antenna that consistently checks the electronic emissions from a phone. The idea of this is to see how well a phone copes with external electronic interference.
And then there's the drop test. A chosen handset is continuously dropped 1.5 metres onto marble to see if it can survive being dropped on the hardest surfaces.
There was also a mini drop test. We watched as a handset was dropped just a few centimetre over and over again - around the same height of your pocket to the floor when sitting on a chair - and this is done 9,000 times to see how durable the handset is. There is also something called the interference test, which simulates a phone being in someone's pocket.
Each sample has to go through three stages of testing: engineering, design and production. There's on average 50 tests in total with others including: vibration, battery, surviving salt and mist spray, headphone and USB tests and one where a phone is put into a room of 65 degrees celsius to see if it still works properly.
It's not until you see a phone being assembled do you truly understand what goes into making our favourite gadgets.
Seeing the effort that goes into making sure your phone doesn't smash when it falls out of your pocket may not stop the frustration when the screen does actually crack, but it at least we are now safe in the knowledge that the manufacturer tried its best to stop such things from happening.
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