Google Modular Phone

Google has been busy. Well, Google is always busy, but in this context, we’re talking about their vision of bringing a Google Modular smart phones into life.

Modular: involving a module as the basis of design or construction.

Umm… Module: each of a set of standardized parts or independent units that can be used to construct a more complex structure.

So. A phone made from a bunch of individual and independent parts. The idea is that you can buy each part separately, depending on what you want and require out of a smartphone instead of buying a whole phone with functionality you might not want or need.

This would also mean you could replace an individual part when it fails or when an update comes out without needing to replace the whole phone. Pros: cheaper and more customizable. You want two camera’s on your smart phone? Buy two camera modules. Use your phone a lot? buy multiple batteries, replace one and charge it while you’re using the other.

Google have just announced their plans to release a Market pilot version of their modular smart phone, called Project Ara in Puerto Rico later this year.

Exciting.

In true Google PR style, they’ll be using a bunch of food trucks running around Puerto Rico to demo the phones later this year. Because, obviously. 

After they’ve understood how customers are going to react to the amount of choice presented to them by a modular phone, and how successful it is, how they can make it more successful, etc, the idea is that the rest of the world will then be introduced to the Google Modular phone too.

See the video for the Google Project Ara modular smartphone here!

New Motorola phone? Looks exciting!

Do you guys remember a lil’ while back when a video featuring a blocky, stack together futuristic idealistic mobile phone started doing the social media rounds?

This one:

If you haven’t seen it, definitely check it out. There are some really smart ideas in there, formed by some people really thinking about how to make the future of tech better.

The phone in the video above is designed by a group called Phonebloks, and it’s a design prototype; it’s not real, yet. Turns out Motorola has been thinking along the same lines as the guys from Phonebloks, and now they’re working together on a project that is super exciting.

The following is from the Motorola Blog, go here to check it out at the sauce.

Goodbye Sticky. Hello Ara.

Over the last six months, our MAKEwithMOTO team took Sticky, a truck wrapped entirely in velcro and filled with rooted, hackable Motorola smartphones and high-end 3D printing equipment, across the country for a series of make-a-thons.

On that trip we saw the first signs of a new, open hardware ecosystem made possible by advances in additive manufacturing and access to the powerful computational capabilities of modern smartphones. These included new devices and applications that we could never have imagined from inside our own labs. Open fuels innovation. See some examples here, here, and here.

After the trip, we asked ourselves, how do we bring the benefits of an open hardware ecosystem to 6 billion people? Meet Ara.

Led by Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, Project Ara is developing a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.

Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it.