Freelance Journalist Neil Parmar recently got a chance to visit BlackBerry’s “New Product Realisation Centre” in Waterloo. This “is the place where BlackBerry prototypes get perfected, including new models such as the Z10, Q10, and other things we can’t tell you about” said the centers manufacturing manager. I have always wanted to get a chance to go there but I have yet to make it up to Waterloo. This Center is not where BlackBerry mass produces phones but where they create and improve prototypes before mass production.
Neil gave us a small sliver of what goes on in the Center in his article for The National. For example:
It took plenty of prototypes – "hundreds if not thousands," Mr Wood estimates – before the Z10 came to look like what it does now. Some rejected models, which were physically produced in a 3D printer in Waterloo, appear to be more elongated or more sharply angled around the edges, according to images of prototypes and design sketches shown to The National…
…Machines like the "roadrunner" – what the techies here call the contraption that places a processor, or digital brains, into a BlackBerry – are programmed to be highly accurate.
Its a great read though sadly the only picture from the article seems to be of a BlackBerry 9900 being manufactured. Let us know if you spot any other gems!
