T-Mobile introduces Tappy, the software testing robot

We live in a world where there are multiple mobile OS, multiple smartphone and tablet vendors and a lot of fragmentation along the software and hardware lines. Naturally, it is hard for every single smartphone or tablet coming out of the factory to be perfect. According to T-Mobile, most of the recent device returns it has witnessed has been due to software glitches which left the customers unsatisfied.

In 2007, the company came up with a novel idea to tackle the problem. A T-Mobile engineer build a robot called ‘Tappy’, or the tap-happy robot. The robot, as the name suggests, is meant to test different phones and tablets before they are offered by T-Mobile.

Tappy is tuned to simulate multiple scenarios and exhaustively test a device’s software. It checks the responsiveness of the device, the performance of its keyboard, its ability to play music and videos, quality of web browsing and a lot, lot more. In other words, Tappy is meant to check a multitude of work scenarios on a device so as to see whether or not it stalls, freezes or causes any other problems when functioning.

To capture any glitches, there is a camera situated right above it. For a phone to pass Tappy’s test, it must work for 24 straight hours without any problems, even the minor ones. T-Mobile claims that ever since it has introduced Tappy, it has been able to reduce its device returns by 75% which is a very substantial figure. Watch the video below to see Tappy in action:

Salman Latif
Categories: Robots
Tags: T-Mobile