Samsung aims to be no.1 in laptops – we talk to the top men in Seoul

7. GET DOWN AND GIVE ME 20,000! – TESTING THE SERIES 9

While visiting with Samsung we were given a rare tour of the company’s testing labs – where no photography was allowed. These aren’t gleamingly high-tech, admittedly, but the sheer size, thoroughness and ingenuity on show certainly put our own Shopper Labs to shame. Samsung’s engineers have developed and built many of the test machines themselves, so they can put through their new laptop designs through a rigourous set of tests – both of prototypes and once mass production has commenced.

We saw one machine that open and shuts the lid of a laptop, a new design must have its lid opened and closed 20,000 times without any sign of problems before its passed fit. The same goes for the ports, where a laptop is bolted down and multiple electronic arms plug and unplug USB, HDMI and other connectors – again 20,000 repetitions on every port. Meanwhile, another machine presses the keys on the laptop’s keyboard over-and-over.

The torsion machine twists the laptop to ensure it won’t break under reasonable pressure – picture provided by Samsung

We were taken into a soundproof room, which is curiously unsettling due to the four foot thick foam baffles on every wall and the ceiling, which kill any reverberation of your voice leaving everything sounding oddly flat. Here an artificial person, with microphones in its artificial ears, ‘listens’ to a laptop so that the engineers can make sure there’s no long term degradation in its audio qualities – like maybe a high pitch wine that develops over time. Another room is kept at a constant 45C, here test samples are left running constantly for six months, we couldn’t last more than ten minutes before heading for the exit.

There’s a wonderful range of machines that were spending their days dropping Series 9 laptops in a variety of inventive ways. Laptops are hit with a jarring knock of 120 joules while on to see if they carry on functioning without a glitch – this test is more for laptops with traditional hard disks rather than SSDs. After that the laptops are vibrated, both in their boxes and standalone. Before being dropped in a laptop bag and being prodded to simulate other items in a bag being pushed up against them.

Before we left, we saw the final round of laptop tortures. The torsion machine grips the laptop on either side and then twists it by five degrees in opposite directions, this is repeated 30,000 times. After that the laptop is subjected to numerous electric shocks, to a variety of points on the chassis, at 8,000V.

After all that, we’re very glad that we’re not a Samsung laptop, but as a potential customer you should be reassured that it is being done thoroughly. This is one of the reasons Samsung points to when discussing its low three-year failure rate – a claimed 14.3%, the lowest of all the major laptop manufacturers.