finder.com.au Chances are pretty good you've got a smartphone
either in your pocket right now or at least within grasping distance. But did
you ever stop to wonder how smartphones were made? We visited smartphone maker
Oppo for an in-depth look at its Factory in Shenzhen. China. Style is not the
emphasis here and it's also somewhat on the warm side. You also wouldn't want
dust anywhere near any of your fancy components so it's time to dust off
anyone visiting including me.
Everywhere the machinery hums and beeps continuously as thousands of individual
components are produced to go into dozens of different handset models.
Oppo manufactures a lot of the components that go into its smartphones
certainly more so than a lot of other competing manufacturers which means its
factory is a bit more of a one-stop shop than you might find elsewhere. During our
tour, the launch and build process of Oppo's brand new phone, the R11 is
in full swing. It doesn't look like much but that's the r11's motherboard.
Boards are slowly printed along the factory lines... "So this machine is the first machine on the line."
...and tested as they go. "So you can see
on the screen there's a cross. On this part. It means that this part is not up to standard."
Each component from a board has to be added in mechanically and fed in from what our
essentially tapes. Each board is mechanically and visually tested.
The caddies used for each board part are dropped for later reuse. While the basic
circuit boards heads to testing with no internet many
of the systems in play here use older Windows operating systems all the way
back to Windows XP
here you can see all the individual components that go into making the R11
including the main casing, the main board, the sim tray, the battery, the antenna, and
all necessary cables. That means it's time to actually start producing the phone.
The vast majority of the production is done by hand although certain specified parts
are in fact robotic. This results in quite a large staff and Oppo are quite
open about their working conditions. Every two hours
staff are given a five minute break. Shifts are ten hours long and the factory
operates on a 24-hour basis, seven days a week. After engraving thet company name the
cases are then checked for defects before moving on cables are largely hand
connected before being moved down the factory line. Each position covers just
one cable or function which is classic factory production technique. Not
everything is hand manufactured though. Anytime you need to screw something in
or weld something into place, that's handled mechanically.
the installation of the mobile antenna involves a mix of robotic and human
interaction before a phone ever gets into production in undergoes about 150
different tests. Temperature tests to ensure it doesn't overheat. Radiation tests to ensure
consumer safety. And then thousands a drop tests. New designs are put through
20,000 drop tests on the top and bottom of the phone and 2000 tests on each of the phone's
four sides from as high up as 1.8 meters. Phones are also tortured with up
to 10,000 twists. Although the models used for quality assurance testing aren't actually
then on-sold. Once specific components are onboard it's time for - you guessed it -
even more testing. The battery is in place and the phone is nearly complete
but its journey out of the factory isn't complete just yet time to place the anti
tampering stickers. "So on the top and bottom of the battery are these fragile stickers.
They're for checking if the phone has been opened by anyone before."
Times the one will quick test...
just because suppose they're built doesn't actually mean to ready to sell
yet testing includes fixed photographic patterns so that you can ensure the proper
focus is achieved every single time.
The precise nature of the tests means that they have to be handled robotically
to ensure the reliability of each test result. Robots do not get rest breaks.
Here the USB interface on the R11 is tested to ensure that it can both charge and
pass data through at the correct rate. The R11's LTE radio is also tested to
ensure that it will work optimally on mobile networks the IMEI that's the
unique identifier on every single phone, is tested to ensure that it's been
properly applied to each handset. "So this is IMEI..." One last final visual check and you've got a
complete handset. Now all you got to do is repeat that several thousand times a day
and you've got a product you can send to market.