T-Mobile?s Tappy is a device testing robot

by Edwin - on September 15th, 2012

Have you ever wondered just when did the world of mobile phones make the jump to that of a full touchscreen display? Well, I guess the Palm Treo (did you remember that particular smartphone? I had a Treo 600, and was in love with it for a long time) was one of the first few commercially successful models, but none of them really caught the imagination of the masses until the iPhone from Apple came out. Fantastic marketing, a decent product, with a ripe market, and you?ve got the perfect recipe for success. The iPhone has not looked back since, and has gone on to break new records with each successive release. This also introduced an era of touchscreen displays for smartphones, leading up till today when T-Mobile talked about their Tappy device testing robot.

According to Grant Castle, vice president of engineering services and quality assurance for T-Mobile USA, Tappy is a custom built software testing robot, and T-Mobile is proud to announce that they are the only carrier in the US to offer such a robot at their disposal.

Tappy will play the role of the consumer, where he has been specially programmed to simulate just what kind of real world scenarios that users or customers will face when using a touchscreen display on their smartphones, and since this is a robot that needs not rest, eat or sleep, the robot is able to test an entire week?s worth of use over the course of 24 hours, ranging from the keyboard to user interface speeds which is the responsiveness of the software is to the user?s commands, battery life, music, voice calls, gaming, text messaging, e-mail, web browsing, and app downloads amongst others.

It is not that easy to pass Tappy?s test, as the device being tested will need to run non-stop for 24 hours, while executing hundreds of tasks without running into a single hiccup, stall, freeze or glitch.

Tappy?s debut half a decade ago, coupled with numerous quality improvement programs, has effectively allowed T-Mobile to reduce device return costs by 75%, now how about that?

As a T-Mobile customer, are you happy with what T-Mobile has done?

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