This week the internet fell in love with a tiny monkey doomscrolling on a phone in bed, scrolling away like it has an 8 AM meeting it is ignoring. That clip racked up a million views in about 14 hours. Cute. But Oppo has a whole room of machines that doomscroll for a living, and they never get sleepy.
Zack Nelson of JerryRigEverything showed them off in his new smartphone factory tour. The tour is sponsored by Oppo, and it is posted as a collab with Oppo’s channel. Most of it is the usual factory eye candy: robots, conveyor belts and “no recording” signs everywhere. But the best part shows up around the 12-minute mark (jump to it here).
Robots with a screen time problem
Oppo calls it the power consumption lab, and it runs fully on its own. In Zack’s words, Oppo programs “robots to doomscroll different apps, replicating real user interactions without needing the actual humans to do any of the doomscrolling.” Each phone sits clamped in a test rig while a robotic stylus taps and swipes through apps, like the short-video feed in the shot above. Engineers watch how much power each app burns, then tune the balance between performance and battery life.
There are more than 100 of these test stations in that one room. Zack’s punchline: it all happens “so that us humans can doomscroll longer and more effectively.” He is not wrong. Someone has to test whether your battery survives a 2 AM spiral through cooking videos, and now it does not have to be an intern.
Why it matters
Battery life on a spec sheet is one number. Battery life after three hours of real swiping, autoplay video and a group chat that will not quit is another. Swipe tests by hand are slow and inconsistent. Robots can repeat the same swipe pattern on the same app for hours, which gives engineers clean data to compare phones, software builds and apps. Oppo says the phone in the tour, the Find X10 Pro Max, packs an 8,000 mAh silicon-carbon battery with 80-watt wired and 50-watt wireless charging. Oppo also claims it keeps 80% of its capacity after five years.
The rest of the tour
The power lab is only about 30 seconds of a 16-minute video, and the rest is worth a watch too. Zack says Oppo can build about 14,000 motherboards a day, each with more than 2,000 tiny parts. About 7,200 Find X10 Pro Max phones roll off the line every day. Signal test chambers run 24 hours a day, and the camera labs include a concert-style lighting stage for testing video. Just remember that Oppo paid for the trip, so the tour shows the polished side of the factory. His companion Short, “THEY SAID NO CAMERAS,” has passed 3.2 million views.
GadgetKing take
The monkey doomscrolls for fun. Oppo’s robots doomscroll for science, around the clock, with zero guilt and no screen time warnings. Honestly, they may have the healthiest relationship with their phones of anyone in the building. Meanwhile the rest of us are still doing it by hand, like animals. Monkeys, specifically.
Sources: JerryRigEverything x OPPO factory tour (sponsored by OPPO; power lab at 11:53), JerryRigEverything Short and X trending: Monkey Doomscrolling Video. Images: JerryRigEverything / OPPO (video stills).
More doomscroll tech: the TimeXplayer V2 matchbook mouse that doomscrolls and the Light flip phone.
