Google may have agreed to sell off Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, but Lenovo isn’t going to get all the good stuff. Google plans to hang onto the vast majority of the patents it picked up when the company acquired Motorola in 2012. And it looks like Google is also keeping Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Products group — the team behind the Project Ara modular smartphone.
The Advanced Technology and Projects team basically comes up with outside-the-box ideas such as Project Ara, passwords you can embed in your skin, and other ideas that are just so crazy… they sound kind of crazy.
Project Ara only sounds crazy because nobody’s ever really made it work yet. But the idea of buying a phone and then upgrading individual components such as the CPU, storage, battery, or camera without buying a whole new smartphone could appeal to a lot of people.
Google seems to think so — The Verge reports the company wants to use its resources to grow the Ara project so that one day it might be more than just a concept.
via Recode
When the video performance in my gaming pc started lagging I bought a better video card and replaced just that component, not the entire machine.
This project IS a step in the right direction and could reduce e waste too.
hopefully google can extend that concept to tablets…
As Daring Fireball put it: “I bet it would take longer to literally flush $9.5 billion in cash down a toilet than it took for Google to do so figuratively on the Motorola acquisition.”
Project Ara is a step in the right direction I won’t have to buy a goddamn new phone everytime to the tune of $600 plus they would cut the number of displays that need to be manufactured since people would only replace if it burnt out or they dropped it and i could buy a new module everytime they invented some new internet connection standard. Cool to have the different modules so I can have different carrier modules (CDMA sprint, verizon GSM ATT Tmobile) I am getting an influx of phones because of all the carriers and the new connections and such and i don’t even have LTE yet lol.
I also like that it opens up possibilities for turning your phone into a tablet, and also computers. I’d love if wacom made a 10′ penabled module then I could pair it with an x86 module. Another plus is batteries manufacturers wouldn’t really have to worry and it could open up how a cellphone is powered(fuel cell, solar etc). With ATT stopping the subsidizing this is the perfect time to implement a phone that can just be upgraded as needed (I still use an og HTC EVO as my main phone so that’d be quite some time lol)
I really hope this becomes the standard because this way instead of spending $400-500 every 6 months or so I could spend maybe $200 every few years lol.
A modular smartphone with changeable parts is not only less expensive than
always buy a new smartphone every year.
Components progress will forthcoming years have an avalanche in development!
So, soon without Project Ara and similar dutch concept Phonebloks,
will new smartphones be launched every 5-month!
It will be a lot of electronic waste if this avalanche in components progress will make smartphone makers to launch a new phone model every 5-month.
Next coming years will components be more dense as LPDDR will be stacked together with SoC
and with ReRAM or MRAM memories will also be stacked together with the SoC.
Not only Nand Flash memories will be stacked as 3D IC but all kinds of components will progress in that way.
I think the variety of people here myself included will upgrade less frequently as individual components fall in price. The wide variety of components will just be things like modules to use different carriers, upgrades to connectivity hardware, storage/battery and the like considering that people are actively buying $30 smartphones. I mean I am still satisfied with my HTC EVO 4G.