Aix en Provence – Crosscall, the French manufacturer of ultra-resistant smartphones and tablets, has just announced this week the upcoming production of the first Franco-European 5G smartphone. The date still seems distant, 2024, but we were able to visit the site which already hosts some of the teams.
Because if smartphones are currently made in China, the company is already doing part of the work in France. Machine design and prototyping, as well as the activity of a test laboratory, are located in Aix-en-Provence. All partially funded by the France Relance plan.
Crosscall’s headquarters have been nestled since 2018 in a new two-storey building in a technology park in the Aix suburbs. From the reception, a showroom details the current models of the range, but also dwells on several historical models, including the Trekker X3, a real phenomenon which initiated the fashion for rugged smartphones for outdoor leisure activities, in 2017.
Decathlon and Crosscall, same digital battles
All the staff were gathered in this building until the building cracked under the number of new collaborators, nearly 200. The creation studio, the development teams and the test laboratory have just been installed in a new building near. And the engineers are enthusiastic about explaining their work.
“We use the funnel principle,” explains Marc Lebrun, Product Design Development Manager at Crosscall. “The starting point for designing a model is the specifications for a new smartphone. » A specification that begins with the definition of a persona, that is to say a typical individual, with his habits and life settings.
On this inspirational basis, the design studio will design a smartphone whose lines and materials will find their place in the universe of the persona. At the same time, the product manager delivers a technical specification, which contains the technical criteria selected for the model. It is on these bases that the first ideation of the new model was born, the result of arbitration between design, business and technical needs, and cost.
To do this, there is no need to create a physical prototype. Everything is done in digital renderings, like what another French company, Decathlon, does with its graphic chain (read: “Reportage in the digital den of Decathlon”). The proximity between the two companies on product design is perhaps no coincidence since two Crosscall engineers have worked at Decathlon in the past.
Another common point between the two companies, the first physical prototype of a new product is made with additive manufacturing, that is to say 3D printing. This is followed by the production of an aesthetic model of the future smartphone, the weight of which must already be that of the final product. Finally, the first four to five production models are used for user tests.
The challenge of relocating manufacturing to France
In all, it is a nine-month creation cycle that is set up in Aix-en-Provence to lead to the manufacture of smartphones in a Chinese factory.
The relocation of smartphone production to France should make it possible to optimize the manufacturing and delivery time that follows this cycle. Because for so long China has distinguished itself as “the factory of the world”, with low labor costs as a major lever, the current difficulties of the global supply chain, but also international tensions, are leading companies to review this strategy.
Especially in terms of high-tech, the cycle of creation and production is obviously subject to the imponderables of technological development. “These may be new Qualcomm components that come onto the market during the development cycle,” illustrates Marc Lebrun. “But in the end, it upsets the workload for the moment more than the end date of the project. »
Upgrade to five-year warranty, but at what cost?
In the test lab, Pierrick Claverie, an R&D mechanical engineer, abuses Crosscall’s smartphones and tablets all day long. “What’s important is that the machines withstand all the tests, not just one,” he explains. “A smartphone must resist the cold, but at the same time resist aging and falls. »
And to illustrate the point by extracting a touch pad from a climatic chamber, that is to say a large freezer. And in fact, the tablet still functions correctly by -25 degrees Celsius, while it is covered with frost.
The climatic chamber, a large freezer, makes it possible to test the operation of the devices in extreme conditions.
Other test machines with barbaric names, such as the “abrasimeter”, make it possible to age smartphones for six months in just four days, to ensure their condition after months of use.
With Crosscall’s announcement last spring of a 5-year warranty on its products, there is no doubt that this type of test will be multiplied by the Crosscall teams. Still, it is the design work and the search for the right material that must ensure this promise.
With a five-year hardware warranty, the issue of repairability becomes critical for Crosscall.
“For the PTT function (walkie-talkie, editor’s note), we realized that some customers press the speak button 350 times a day,” says Clément Souyris, electronic engineer. “So we’re doing 700,000 pressure tests of 1.2 kg force on this piece, to make sure it’s actually going to hold up for at least five years. »