By one of those excellent fates of timing, I had a comment sent in by Paul Fennemore of Businesszone UK about mobile phone testing and a technology his company has, called m-Test.
The same day as he sent the email I was sat in Spirent's test labs in Crawley, going through how half a million quid's worth of test kit would hammer a few mobile phone handsets in a forthcoming report I'm about to start (so watch this space on that one).
So, sorry Paul, not this time with respect to your software (which focuses on mobile apps testing I believe) but - is there a requirement for mobile handset testing? Absolutely. The basic conformance testing that each vendor has to pass in order to flog their phones legally on the market is exactly that - basic! When it comes, therefore, to genuine call reliability, even with just voice there are several questions to be asked and answered. Throw in data and video and the situation is even more demanding of true analysis - that is scientific, repeatable analysis, not simply giving the kids a few phones and asking for a report on how good they were a week later.
The reality is that, every time you blame the network for poor performance it could easily be the handset itself. Broadband-Testing, then, is coming to the rescue again, to sort the iPhone's from the Storm's, from the E whatever's and the... well, you get the picture (probably in 5mega-pixels). And then you'll know whether to blame it on the operator or the handset vendor. Or the operator again for making a bad choice of which phones they sell in the first place...
