Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration test?

[mweida15]

I've found several accelerometer apps for smartphones (for example http://www.iseismometer.com and http://www.now-instruments.com/products/3-vibsensor ). Are these useful for doing quantitative vibration analysis, and if not, what are their deficiencies?

 

[Bandit127]

The phone microphone is a cartoon microphone for anything other than voice frequencies.

I suspect the same may be true for every transducer in there. (There are lots of them produced in a very competitive market). The first place I would be looking to evaluate the accelerometer is frequency response, rise time or some other measure of its linearity over a frequency domain.