We got new variants for testing (by variant I mean a stripped off mobile phone with all its components and silicon chips lying naked on the PCB, with a big handset attached to it). This one is supposed to be working on EDGE technology having fancy named features like digital RF processing, complete battery manager, persistent FS NOR etc. Now and only now we've got some "challenging" work to do.
First of all, the board religiously disobeys every single statement mentioned in the user manual.
With few tweaks here and there, we were able to download the software on to the board after which it takes as less as 5 minutes to start up!!! Imagine, you switch on your mobile and you have to wait for 5 minutes to make a call.
It did not take much time for us to realize that even waiting for that 5 long minutes was not worth at all, for within next 2 minutes, it would freeze. To give an idea as to what "freeze" means, picture yourself trying to call someone and miraculously all the keys stop functioning and makes you feel like crushing your mobile under the truck.
We tried with different software and by God's grace it was more stable. But the funny part was the voice of the person speaking at the other end sounded like a robot, very electronic and kinda distorted.
Memory dump was not a viable option either, for none of us knew how to use the debugger tool and the racial clearcase gave access only to French team and not for the Mexican.
We testers are supposed to test the product and stabilize it, but this one is a classic underdeveloped hardware. Seems as though the hardware, chipset and development team consisted of Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Rembrandt and the likes instead of geeks.
