Modular Madness

A while ago I ran into an idea called Phonebloks, and thought it was clever, that it might work, and that I really, really want one. As someone who has built their own computer, I have an appreciation for the power and price of a custom built computer  (Protip: it's cheaper and better). I love the freedom of being able to choose the hardware that goes into my computer. When I saw the opportunity for that to happen with a phone as well, I was ecstatic. At the time, realistically I considered it not very feasible. From a design and technology perspective, phones are able to be small because the hardware is arranged on top of each other, intertwined with each other, there is zero wasted space. When you separate and isolate the parts, and put room between them, the phone takes up a lot more space. Unlike PCs, phones (obviously) need to be compact to fit in pockets as such. This article explains a bunch of reasons an idea like Phonebloks probably wouldn't work. After reading it, I was mildly pessimistic about the possibility of such a phone until very recently.

On October 28th, Motorola announced Project Ara, essentially the exact same thing as Phonebloks, and I have to say, I'm excited to see them prove Colin Lecher wrong. I've even signed up for the Project Ara Dscout, the app that lets users give feedback, comments and ideas to the developers through a series of "missions" over the next few months. So for the rest of this post, I'm going to talk about my initial thoughts about Project Ara.

So like I mentioned, I'm really excited for this idea, and I really want one, but I am worried about the size of the phone since, as I also mentioned, the parts are going to be separated and there is going to be some wasted space. Hopefully, technology has advanced enough for this to be a negligible problem. I also hope they don't solve it by making the parts less complex, trading higher-end technology for the module design. Either that or made the phone the size of a Phablet or something stupid like that.

I don't remember where, but I read somewhere that specific builds of Android are required for different combinations of parts in order to have full optimization. This isn't a problem with conventional smartphones since every phone has the same parts, but with a modular phone, this is obviously a problem. I'm curious to see how that problem is solved.

I'm very curious to see what companies start developing modules for Project Ara, and for what. It'd be awesome if Nvidia, AMD and Intel made processors and things specifically for gaming. I mean that's the entire point of this right? To have phones that can be customized to fit even the most specific or obscure niches.

So yea.
I'm pretty excited.