Device testing needs to drastically improve or carriers and manufacturers face big risks to their reputations.

By Abhijit Kabra, senior executive, Accenture

Kabra: How well has your mobile device been tested? Photo: Accenture

Cell phones have come a long way in the last five years: We can surf the web, listen to music, watch TV, and make payments on our phones. So why is the process of testing these devices stuck in the 1990s?

Leading mobile handset makers around the world spend millions of dollars testing these products from the onset of product development until they deliver them to market.  Yet according to a new Accenture survey of executives from the electronics and high-tech industries, 88 percent of respondents revealed that they do not do a good job of testing these handsets.

It’s disappointing and surprising that so many manufacturers are lax in their testing approaches. Testing may seem like a straightforward exercise. But without stringent testing of these phones, the entire mobile ecosystem—from manufacturers to wireless carriers to retailers—risk putting out poor quality products that dissatisfy consumers, lower sales, and damage corporate brands.

Given this predicament, manufacturers are under mounting pressure to revamp their testing methods. And they should, particularly during these tough economic times when cost savings and process improvements are so crucial.

The goal to revamp should be systemic, aimed at creating a new, well-coordinated and compre­hensive testing strategy—the opposite of a piecemeal and incomplete approach. This new, more consistent and industrialized method, will reduce product development costs, deliver expected quality levels faster, and defend brand reputations. More

A new tech wizard is fighting to return the ailing cellphone maker to relevance with a slate of new phones–and help from Google.

It’s been more than a year Sanjay Jha left wireless chip maker Qualcomm (QCOM) to come to Motorola (MOT). As co-CEO of Motorola (along with Greg Brown), he took on a task even the private equity firms had passed on: saving the iconic handset division. Just as he began to realize the severity of the company’s situation, the market crashed—and everything got even harder. Jha stripped $1.4 billion from the budget and doubled down on a new strategy to hitch the company's wagon to Google (GOOG), building a series of smartphones powered by the Android operating system. (For more on the top operating systems, check out System Overload.)

This fall, as the first of the smartphones hit the market, Jha sat down with Fortune to reflect on his first year on the job, his plan for saving the company, and the enormity of the challenges yet to come. Read the whole story on here.

How hand-held computers – also known as cell phones – are changing the world.

By Professor Iqbal Z. Quadir, director of the MIT Legatum Center and founder of Grameenphone

Quadir: Cell phones will relieve poverty. Photo courtesy of MIT Legatum Center.

Last month marked the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, an extraordinary event for all of us to celebrate. Forty years later, there is another extraordinary phenomenon to celebrate – billions of people around the world, including those in the poorest countries, now have computers in their hands that are thousands of times more powerful than the computers that guided the lunar mission.

Over half of the people in poor countries, including more than one quarter of people over the age of 14 in Afghanistan, use these hand-held computers. In many of the places where the devices have proliferated there are still inadequate roads, poor schools, ill-equipped hospitals, unreliable electricity, and no potable water.

But recently, these computers—also known as cell phones—have been helping local people to tackle these challenges. More