Test Equipment; Product or Feature?

Reverse Logistics Magazine, Mar/Apr 2008

Over the Christmas Holiday, it was amazing to see the growth that cell phone products experienced as what could be called the gift of choice, in 2007. There are countless stories in the media tracking this market shift. Essentially, if you were in the 3rd Grade or higher, you wanted a new cell phone “under the tree.” At least you did if it had all the right features… It is that word features that I want to focus on. I can think of no product in history that has devoured so many other product segments and transformed them into “features.” Consider the list below. All of these items were once ONLY stand-alone products.

• Text Pager
• 2-Way Pager
• Voice Mail/Voice recorders
• Calculator
• Pay Phone
• PDA/Calendar/Organizer
• Email Client
• Camera (still and video)
• Web Browser
• Fax Client
• Access Point
• GPS/Navigator
• MP3/Media Player
• Bar-code Scanner
• Child/Employee Tracker
• Game Console

For many of these products, being incorporated as various features into a cell phone, generated very negative market impacts to the existing product lines. Many were able to change their lineup and capabilities and still remain stand-alones. Others have not. Regardless—the pressure and disruptive affect from becoming a “cell phone feature” is undeniable.

What Could Be Next?

I want to make the case that one of the next product lines I want to see become a cell phone feature is the test equipment needed for its own repair and diagnostics. Yes, I heard what you just said. I heard that incredulous thought, “What are you thinking!!!” OK making test equipment a feature on a phone is crazy, right? Maybe, maybe not. First let me tell you why you want to do this. For RL, the single biggest product segment that gets repaired is cell phones. On average the cost per repair for the test equipment in a repair depot is $0.80 -$1.10 per phone. That cost is much greater in other markets, like Asia, where there are often suites of test equipment used in retail locations to test and screen the simpler repairs. In these retail service locations, the equipment costs can reach $3-5 per repair, due to equipment cost and lower utilization rates. This is a huge per-repair cost for RL service that really needs to be addressed.

Let me walk you through my thinking on how this can work. Back in “the day” when cell phones operated on the AMPS standard, a great deal about the function and the air interface was analog. Anything that needs to evaluate analog signals tends to be very complex. Plus the processing power in the phones at that time was very limited. Just the circuitry required for communication with the network would often be located in state-machines that were etched in silicone because the micro-controllers were just too slow or too power hungry to support the system and the UI.

How is it different today? First, everything is digital. The measurement of digital signals is much easier than the ‘shades of gray’ complexity of analog signal measurement. This is because so much of the work in decoding information from the digital (CDMA/GSM/LTE/Etc…) data stream is based onisbased statistical calculations. So all we really need to assess digital signals, is something to do the math for us. And, you guessed it—we have huge processing power in the phones today. The speed is so fast that no longer do we need a lot of complex silicon to manage the air interface. For a number of simple phones, the air-interface control is a little more than a chunk of code that is a shared load on the processor along with the UI. So, we clearly have the processing power, so how would this work?

What Can Be Done Today

There are three players in wireless that are making technology moves in cell phone/wireless that will undoubtedly lead to a significant level of test capability residing in the phones; Nokia, Qualcomm and Google are of special note. Let me outline why I say this.

For Nokia they are acting on a strategy that ties the user experience of Nokia product to the functionality of the phone and the size of the data pipe. For that plan to work, Nokia recognized they needed to expand the range of applications that ran on phones. There are two recent apps that will give us some insight as to just how close we may be with service functionality existing as a feature.

The first is the new Nokia DeviceStatus Tool . With this application working in a Nokia cell phone, there are a whole set of parameters that are gathered from the phone and a connected PC. If something goes wrong, this tool assesses the general health of your PC and generates summary data to facilitate communication with Customer Care for resolution. In the future, the notes on the Nokia web site advise that new versions could have capability to connect directly with Nokia for virtual diagnostics and Care Support. How powerful would it be for a repair center to have a complaint code that was meaningful because it was gathered from Customer Care and function testing in the phone?

Another application that I am really excited about is the Nokia Energy Profiler Tool . This tool was intended to provide programmers with an easy way to optimize SW functions to use the least power possible from the cell phone’s battery. But the real power of this tool is in its possible use in repair troubleshooting. To understand how this could be used as a troubleshooting tool, consider the power up process for almost all modern electronics. When you press the power button, there is an interrupt that starts a sequence of steps. During these steps, each section of the phone is enabled in a chained process. If you measure the current consumed during this ‘wake up’ process, you can identify a failed sub-section. To make this process a little easier to visualize, refer to the diagram below.

In this chart you will see four landmarks identified at (A, B, C and D). Each of these landmarks represents a point where one of a cell phone’s electronic subsections is turned on;