Google’s Project Ara is an effort to design a modular smartphone, allowing you to swap out the processor, memory, screen, camera, battery hardware for different modules.
While Google didn’t manage to launch a pilot project in 2015 as originally planned, the company is hoping to begin rolling out a test this year. And it looks like someone is already testing Project Ara hardware… if you believe a listing posted to the GFXBench website.
It’s not unusual to find GFXBench listings for products long before they ever make it to market… and some devices that show up in the database are never launched. It’s also possible someone could be using a fake profile on their phone, which would fool the website.
That said, there’s nothing particularly implausible about this listing. You should probably take the specs with a few grains of salt for a few reasons thought: one, this isn’t an official announcement and things could change before launch. And two: the whole idea of Project Ara is to let users change the hardware. So all we’re looking at is a picture of what one version of a Project Ara phone might look like.
It’s said to have a 1920 x 1080 pixel display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, and Android 6.0 software.
But it’s also said to have a 13.8 inch screen and 10GBÂ and 25GB of storage (possibly on two different storage modules?) so yeah… grains of salt. This might just be a test board that someone was running tests on.
That said, it checks all the usual boxes for sensors and wireless hardware, including front and rear cameras, an accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity sensor, light sensor, pedometer, barometer, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and a sim card.
via Juggly