The first time I saw a modular phone was long ago (2000) in the lab of a very large hardware company where they had a prototype from a start-up they'd invested in.
It was made like a deck of cards, cpu, display/kbd, battery and cell components could all be swapped out. There even was a camera module for the back. It didn't make it. The main reasons iirc were that people see phones as integrated wholes, that contacts breed failure and that making an integrated phone versus one made out of pieces is simply cheaper.
I give this about a 5% chance of success, and 1% market share, maybe less, if it does succeed. That's still more than 10 million units per year, so not a failure. But this isn't going to be your next phone.
If it falls much below that unit volume, the scheme implodes because the optional components will not find enough of a market to get manufactured.
In order to succeed, the internal connectivity scheme needs to not go obsolete over at least two, and preferably three product generations.
It also needs to find a market. People still build their own PCs for gaming, for lab automation, and other distinctly minority pursuits. So far, the niche for this product seems to be "people who find the idea attractive but can't articulate an actual need."
This is Hacker News, where people are disproportionately far more likely to buy such a thing than the average consumer. I would expect to see the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 significantly overrepresented here as well; the only people I know in person who own them are hackers.
It's a little gross that they seemingly picked up the PhoneBloks project and then entirely erased any traces of the original product and its creators. Hopefully that team's still involved and getting compensated...
PhoneBloks was just a "product" of designer's imagination, nothing more. All he did was to think about "LEGO-phone" and make a catchy animation describing the idea - the idea that wasn't even unique or new, as similar ones (together with 3D-printed or homemade cases, which were later actually realized) were already appearing few years ago on Openmoko mailing lists triggered by GTA04 motherboard upgrade for Neo Freerunner.
Was watching the live stream of the Ara conference yesterday and they explicitly talked about PhoneBloks a bit and even acknowledged that it has more public recognition. They also link to them - projectara.com/more.
I love that that Wikipedia article references Sugababes - a British pop band which has changed entire line up over it's existence (begging the question is it still the same band).
I think John Gruber over at Daring Fireball said it best:
"I remain highly skeptical that a modular design can compete in a product category where size, weight, and battery life are at such a premium. Even if they can bring something to market, why would any normal person be interested in a phone like this?"
He doesn't see any advantage to a modular phone? Then I don't think he's looking hard enough. I stand by my belief that Gruber has backed himself into a corner where he now needs to defend anything Apple does, and attack just about anything the competition does that is at least seen by others as a threat to Apple, if not by him.
You've misread his statement. He sees the benefit, but points out that the tradeoffs will be the main areas of competition among smartphones: size, weight, battery life. All three will be worse in a modular phone. You'll also get less for your money overall. Not to mention that having to choose among components just adds an additional layer of option stress that most consumers don't want. Sure, there's a market for a modular phone, but it's not going to seriously compete against the Galaxy or the iPhone in the mass market.
>Not to mention that having to choose among components just adds an additional layer of option stress that most consumers don't want.
I think consumers actually like a little choice in their products now. I mean, take a look at the apple laptop website.
Also, I could imagine vendors offering different phone presets (e.g. battery life, photo-taking, media consumption) and then letting the customer further customize it if they want.
And yet, probably 99% of their owners will never purchase a replacement battery.
For a given sized phone, a replaceable battery is necessarily smaller capacity than a fixed equivalent, due to space wasted on additional housings, clips and connectors.
As a phone owner with kids, I just don't see this happening in my household. Modules getting dropped/lost (especially the critical one that makes the others go), connectors wearing out from constant playing around or, even worse, smeared with food and crammed with junk.
I have a hard time keeping unified units intact and working, much less letting my family near a Lego kit that needs to be 100% assembled to work properly...
Well, the problem's just (obviously) that if you ever open up an iPhone (or I suspect any competing phone), every cubic millimetre of it is filled with things that do stuff. To add all the panels that bridge components, the connecting hardware etc can only add weight and space. It'll be interesting to see if Google can make it work, but you can't say that it's not unjustified skepticism.
In terms of 'any advantage', I interpreted it as 'any overall advantage', and I think I probably agree with him.
As a result Gruber has made himself almost entirely irrelevant. I almost can't wait to watch him twist himself into knots when Apple releases a larger phone.
Size matters? My Android friends have huge phones (and cases) - Clearly they don't mind a phone being big and if the phone had cheap replaceable parts, that giant "life proof" case wouldn't be needed.
Weight matters? I have never heard "I wish my phone was lighter" from anyone, anywhere. In fact I've heard from several who think a heavier phone means it's "better made".
Battery life - Again my Android friends (and a few 5c friends) suffer from poor battery life - How would a phone where you could easily swap for a new/better battery be inferior?
Gruber should remind himself of the first generation of pretty much any tech product. Bulky, ugly, and clumsy could describe a lot of projects that push technology to it's limits.
It does matter when comparing with alternatives. Modular phone with comparable specs to other phones (screen size, cpu, camera, etc) would probably be bigger, thicker, heavier and uglier. In other words, even when a customer is buying a big 5"+ phone, then I think he/she will probably not choose the modular one.
I can give you bigger and thicker since I would expect those too. Neither is really a problem though. One of the benefits of the otterbox case for my Galaxy G3 is that it made the phone thicker, and it's already on the big side.
Heavier though will probably depend on the modules you choose, and ugly, well I thought what they were showing looked kind of good.
Personally, a lack of a SD card is one of the reasons I didn't get the Nexus or an iPhone. There are people that want these types of features and they win when comparing with alternatives.
Yes, there are people whose needs are different. And I am much in favor of modular design (at least replaceable battery, SD card and USB OTG, but project Ara goes much further), but that does not seem to be the case with mainstream consumer.
The interesting thing about the mobile phone market is how big it is and what that means for niches.
There are about 900m Android phones out there. That means if you assume only 10% of the market might be interested in a particular variant of phone, your total addressable market is still 90 million (and growing).
My instinct is that this level of customisation is probably a relatively niche thing but - as outlined above - that doesn't mean that there isn't room for it to be commercially successful.
I think the key is the purchasing model. A "free phone" with contract every 2 years creates a situation where the consumer doesn't value repairing/upgrading their phone.
If you had to pay say $600-$800 for a phone upfront, one is upgradable/repairable and the other is not (but faster/sexier) I think some (maybe many) would choose the former.
>> "I know people that just toss an $800 laptop like it's nothing when something goes wrong. We truly live in a disposable society."
Nope. You just happen to know people who can afford to toss an $800 laptop. For most of the 'lower middle class' people I know purchasing a laptop is a big deal and only happens once every 3/4/5 years. Even then they don't spend more than £400. Even when their laptop is practically unusable through age, damaged parts, viruses etc. they continue to use it because £400/$800/a new laptop is a lot of money.
But the only difference is the amount of money, not the attitude. No one thinks "I can afford a new laptop, but I'll rehabilitate this old one anyway."
I must not be anyone then. I have a (nearly) six-year old Thinkpad that I've upgraded a few times. I could have afforded a new replacement at any time, but I'd rather keep using the machine I already have.
i very much agree, products don't tend to last as long as they do anymore, and servicing them tends to cost close to the cost of new ones..
2-3 years ago I got new sony led tv and my wife was under the impression it would be our TV for the next 10-15 years... if major components don't go out in the next 1-3 years i will be happily suprised
The point is: A barebone model for 50 bucks that you could transform in a high-end device expending more money on it when you can afford it.
Also... need more battery life? Why not replace that extra RAM memory module for battery one? Or even... why not to replace the 4 Gb RAM module for one with 1Gb + more battery?
I get what you're saying and yet the more I read about this the more I find myself shaking my head thinking how stupid this really is. It's clearly not marketed at me. I will continue to buy standard STRESS-FREE devices.
Not every device is made to satisfy the entire market.
And they have already acknowledged they plan on having "effort free" choices available for consumers. Probably have a "about the same as a Samsung" option, a cheap option that has the important bells and maybe a minimal option you can build off of.
Modularity has its advantages too. You could always run a bare bones phone with only the hardware you actually use attached to it while having a very good battery.
Agree with everything, especially weight and battery comments.
Wouldn't it be nice to have an easily hot swappable battery with a tiny internal battery in the phone so you wouldn't even have to turn it off to do so?
> Weight matters? I have never heard "I wish my phone was lighter" from anyone, anywhere.
Your anecdotal evidence is about as valid as mine, and I can guarantee you that weight matters. Tactile feel matters. Looks, of course matter.
In all these cases, a modular device fares poorly compared to an integrated one. This is a handheld device - can you not imagine the amount of dirt and grime that would cake up between the module gaps if you don't have a case on the device? And if you do have a case, now you have to uncase to switch around the modules.
The era of modularity is past, or not yet ready to come back.
I don't see weight, tactile feel or looks on the list.
For those with cases, I doubt most even know what their phone really "feels" like, let alone actually weighs or even looks like.
As far as having to remove the case to swap a hardware component .. I don't think that's a major hurdle, we're not talking about a daily, weekly or even monthly task that would make that a pain.
I have a phone with a slightly larger screen than a Galaxy S5, that is also slightly smaller (LG G2). The efficient use of space mitigates the (few) disadvantages of a larger screen.
A phone that is bulky and has a large screen would be impractical. That's why size matters.
I don't really know who they are targetting with this device or their anticipated volume, so it is hard to say whether this will be "successful" or not. It seems certain to me that this is not a mass-market offering, though.
I'm not sure that "size matters" here means "small is better than large". But with a modular design where you can swap parts in and out, how could you ever change the size of your screen if you want a larger phone?
Not sure about increasing the size but being able to replace/fix a broken screen would be huge. I'm no hardware engineer but I would suggest that making the phone/screen bigger would in fact be possible, if the modular platform was designed to accommodate.
If I could get an Android phone that's twice as thick as my current one, with the volume made up of a huge battery, regardless of how heavy it is, I'd buy it tomorrow. This obsession with thinness and lightness is something I frankly don't care about in the least.
I tend to agree with Gruber on this one. Modular phone might be perfect for me (will see when and if it gets released), but I am not sure it can attract the masses as well as polished, high-end phones from Apple, Samsung, Nokia, etc. Size, weight and appearance do matter a lot to average customer.
But so what? It's perfectly OK for a product to appeal to a small niche as long as it breaks even. I am so tired of the conceit (mostly put about by lazy journalists) that there must be only one best product in any category. That just leads to lowest-common-denominator approaches in which quality is judged on popularity alone.
Agreed. This is yet another product that will appeal to techies and first adopters only.
For instance, people could -- in theory -- build their own computers with a bunch of modular components, but instead a lot of them buy a Mac or some other variation of all-in-one solution.
Than again, a lot of them do self-build. Even if this system is only good enough to attract techies and enthusiasts, that might be enough to give it a viable market.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/ and with the influx of new people in PC gaming with self build rigs - the custom PC market is quite healthy right now.
And it is also very niche. The custom PC market has been, and will continue to be a "healthy" market, but it is by no means a growing market. The difference between a custom built PC, and a modular designed phone, is that for the most part, a static device, that is, it doesn't go anywhere, versus a phone, which will be abused just by the nature of the fact that it is a mobile phone (I mean the presentation is proof of this, the phone broke the day before).
Now am I saying that there is no market for this, absolutely not, but this in no way will become the standard for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one to me, is time. I used to build all my PC's, taking the time to compare parts, read reviews, check out overclockability, and look for deals and get the best bang for my buck, but as I have gotten older, I just want a machine that works, my disdain for everything Apple, has completely turned around, I absolutely love my Macs now, not because I think Apple and Steve are gods gift to computing, but because they work, they maintain resale value, and compared to PC hardware, they are superior.
It's different. With computers, you pick your own motherboard, CPU, GPU, memory config and so on. These things look funny and technical and most people don't even touch them. But even casual users regularly replace/expand their displays, storage (I'm counting external hard drives) and laptop batteries.
With this project, your SoC - which is your CPU, motherboard, networking, memory and baseband chip all in one - is still just one package. Yet you can easily supplement other varieties of packages for displays, storage, batteries, cameras. Each of these things are quite well understood by many casual users.
Well, it has some other benefits which might outweigh those points. Beside the added flexibility in general, ecological benefits might be one of those because you can avoid highly toxic and expensive-to-recycle waste if you can replace parts of your phone and escape the "I need to replace my phone every two years because one small part is now outdated or broken"-cycle.
I don't think Google expects this to be a massive consumer product, but it sounds like it can be great fun for techies. In this case, Gruber's opinion hardly matters.
This is not a phone, as someone noted in another comment.
It is a good old pocket computer, and it is modular, and mine may (or may not) have a telephony module.
I have a Galaxy Note, I think I use it as a phone twice a week on average. I use it as a HN browser, a camera, a podcast downloader and listener, a navigation, a game console, an e-reader, a translator, for contacts and calendar, and phone calls. Having a big screen is helpful in 9 of these 10 activities. Being big is annoying in 1 of them.
Moreover a big device has a much bigger battery, thus a somewhat better battery life (only somewhat because the screen is bigger too, and you use it more.)
Indeed, the classic definition of "phone" hardly applies to these devices anymore. They're Cray 2 supercomputers (well, "super" back in the day) shrunk into a matchbox and include, as one tiny program making use of the mic/speaker/radio, a "telephone"-like capability.
Although I am blind I still consider myself a "normal" person. This could be the answer to my very specific requirements though. I'd love to build a phone with the lowest quality screen I can, no camera, as big a battery as I can get, and possibly a keyboard. For obvious reasons something like this will never be produced by any company.
Why offer electronics components to the general public? After all, most people don't want to create their own electronic devices, therefore making such things available in retail channels is a complete waste of time. I'm not too sure about screwdrivers either.
I can't believe people are giving Gruber's arguments the time of day on a news site for hackers.
If you read Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Solution [1] book (sequel to Innovator's Dilemma), you'll see him talk about "integration" and "disintegration" (basically the modularization of a product or market).
So in the early days of a new market/category of product, the products are highly integrated, for several reasons. One is that the market is still new, so there isn't much of an "ecosystem" to begin with. Another is that the company with the "first mover's advantage" wants to keep stuff proprietary as much as possible, and another is that the product still kind of "sucks" in some areas (camera, battery life, in early days of the iPhone for example - compared to the traditional competition). So they need to make everything work as tightly as possible, to squeeze all the possible optimization out of it.
But eventually, the market becomes mature, the ecosystem grows, and the products become "good enough" for most people. So much of that extreme optimization or need to keep everything proprietary and in-house isn't needed anymore, and you actually start getting some advantages from the modularization of the market, such as buying a better modem than you can make from a "modem company", and so on.
For a while I wasn't sure this was going to happen to the smartphone market (ignoring the fact that there has been an increasing trend towards customization through colors and whanot), because for one the smartphone is a very tighly put together product, and it's hard to imagine how it could've been separated into a dozen different pieces without being junk, and two, for a while the trend was towards increasing "closeness" of devices, rather than openness.
But it seems it's going to happen, and ARA looks just about right (I wasn't a big fan of the Phonebloks pin-model). Still, even if the strategy here is "correct", and most likely on the right side of history, Google will still need to excel at execution, and make sure using such a phone gives very few disadvantages compared to a regular phone, but many more advantages (being able to use whatever camera you want, without buying a $700 phone every year, and so on). Otherwise, people could be turned off by the initial version, and then it will be a lot harder to convince them what a good idea this is. But for now I'm optimistic.
> So in the early days of a new market/category of product, the products are highly integrated
Not sure about this one, seems like the opposite to me. Twenty years ago, PC's were very modular, and it was very common to add/upgrade a sound card, memory, cpu, video card etc. Fast forward to now, and for the most common computing devices (think tablets and smartphones), there is almost zero modularity or upgradability. Even with current PC's (i.e. mostly laptops), it's increasingly limited.
The same trend is apparent in other similar technology. For example with analog TV, people could add a PAL block if their TV was NTSC or SECAM. Upgrading your car used to be significantly easier etc.
"Hugh Trevor-Roper is supposed to have said that 'history teaches us nothing except that something will happen', and this applies pretty well to tech: this is so young and so fast-changing an industry that drawing parallels is more misleading than helpful."
You're forgetting the first wave of PC's - Apple II, TRS-80, TI-99, C64, etc. These machines had very little modularity compared to the wave of beige boxes that followed the IBM PC standard. I think Christensen even uses that as an example.
Interesting observations on the flux between fixed and modular here. PCs today are still modular devices with varying degrees of specialization. Macs have less modularity. What they both have in common are peripherals.
Until now, smart phones/tablets have had little in the way of peripherals. Some headsets, keyboards, memory cards, etc., but people seem to be clamoring for certain peripherals above all others. They seem less concerned about CPU types, just like the in Mac and PC world. Key peripherals seem to be camera and some kind of "geekport"/internet of things.
I don't see a need to modularize every part of the phone a la PCs, but to expand the peripherals would help. It might be as simple as adding extra USB ports.
Yes. My take: it's triggered by consumer needs being "overshot": phones better (2.3GHz, quad-core, 3GB, HD), do you really need it?
Integration is crucial for meeting consumer needs when the tech was not as good: the first iPhone had a tiny CPU and GPU, but they managed to squeeze adequate performance by connecting everything with extreme efficiency.
But once it's good enough, people start to worry about other factors - like I want a big battery, but I don't need 3G (or vice versa). Customization, not just replacing broken bits. Here, a modular approach shines. But it's less efficient, so there needs to be spare power. The key driver is that users want customization more than they want extra compute power.
Android is modular, compared to iOS, and it's worked out well - once phone got powerful enough. It couldn't have in the very earliest days, because the spare power wasn't there. Hardware modularity is the next step. It may be a little early, but I think it's clear that high-end phones have wildly overshot mainstream needs (a quad-core HD phone!? what a boondoggle). Actually, today mid- and low-end phones are perfectly fine for most people.
PS: this pressure will also drive the next category - whether it's iWatches or iGlasses or something else, I don't know, but it will be smaller, more convenient, cheaper, easier to use - and there won't be power to spare in such a small form-factor. Therefore, it's likely that Apple will do it (hence the i's) since they are the company most integrated across all the levels of hardware, silicon, OS, apps, appstore. They are best placed to squeeze the needed performance (doesn't guarantee they will though).
BTW: I like Christensen's theories, but I'm not wholly convinced. Interpretation seems too subjective....
I am curious about what YC partners think of Christensen's modularity vs integrated (and his other theories), since they are VCs, in the business of predicting technology. But I've never heard them even discuss it...
Yeah this is probably just one of Google's projects where they try and make a device that totally uses the concept, realise that most of it's pretty bad and redo it with a device that uses it for the single part that worked. The cynic in me says 'replaceable battery' but I'd like to see replaceable SOC.
Screen and battery are the two most common complaints/issues with current phones. Simply allowing consumers to buy and swap these two parts would go a long way.
I find this interesting in contrast to Nexus devices. Two or three years ago, most Android phones had SD cards and removable batteries. These features have been conspicuously absent from recent Nexus phones in spite of their appeal to the power-user and developer markets who are among the most likely to want such features.
I hope it gets some traction. I'm seeing a lot of sameness in high-spec Android phones, and something like this might help manufacturers learn what kinds of variations might sell without having to take the risk of mass-producing and marketing a new model.
P.S. - if any manufacturers are reading this, I want a high-spec Android phone the size of an iPhone. My Nexus 5 is somewhat uncomfortable in my pocket and too hard to use one-handed due to its size.
I'm not sure what part of my comment you're responding to, but I don't think the Moto X is a good response to anything I said. It doesn't have removable storage. It doesn't have a removable battery. With a 4.7" screen, it's much bigger than an iPhone.
My mother owns a Moto X, bought on my recommendation. It is much closer in width to my Nexus 5 than it is to the iPhone and barely more comfortable for me to use one-handed than my Nexus 5. The difference in width is apparent in the photograph you linked.
I commend Motorola for an excellent job eliminating non-screen area on the front of the Moto X. It's a very space-efficient device in that regard, but my complaint is about reaching all areas of a touchscreen with my thumb while holding it in one hand, and nothing fixes that like a smaller touchscreen.
it's bigger than an iPhone, but smaller than the bulk of recent phones (unless you look at crappy low-end phones). I think it's just the right size, the iPhone is too small.
The iPhone is not the most compact phone around, and by compact I don't mean small. It is smaller, just not very compact, so less efficient screen wise.
Nexus doesn't have a storage slot because no one has found a solution to the storage dilemma. How do I add storage without bringing back the broken file explorer interface?
Also the market has shown a preference for size and look over replaceable parts, so not surprised Google went that way.
Also the market has shown a preference for size and look over replaceable parts, so not surprised Google went that way.
Has it? Samsung is the largest seller of Android phones by a significant margin, and most of Samsung's phones have replaceable batteries and SD cards. This comes with a cost, in that most reviews I've read complain that the removable back panel on Samsung phones looks and feels cheap.
I suspect Google was motivated by some combination of cost and a desire to encourage reliance on web services rather than on-device storage.
I used my T-Mobile G2 until it died a month ago, and had to do an emergency replacement, which ended up being a Nexus 5. I'm going absolutely insane not being able to just type without thinking about it. When you have to think about your input and often correct it, you are no longer able to simply stream your thoughts, and each micro-interruption is actually quite a distraction from getting things done. It's frustrating.
I remember computers built in the 90s and 2000s, touting their modular construction and never having to buy a new system again. I wonder if those machines are still in operation?
I think what would guarantee longevity is something that is rock-solid good, inexpensive, repairable, and easy to develop on. I'm thinking of track records of computers like the Commodore 64, iMac, or in vehicles like the beetle, video game consoles, ipod, iphone etc.
Pretty much this. You've got a backbone and some modules, but within a year the second generation of the same backbone and modules will be released, probably sized differently, different i/o, etc, because time simply won't stand still when it comes to devices.
It'd be more marketable as a device with easily replaceable components, as mentioned above; easily replacing a screen or battery would be convenient for the more clumsy amongst us.
You mean, pretty much any computer not made by Apple? Sure, I still have my home-rolled desktop from 7 years ago. I just put together a new machine earlier this year I expect to get at least that much life out of. I don't even buy top-spec parts, just good price/performance ratios for each part and cobble it together. And if something breaks I can fix it myself.
It's not too technical and not too hard to do. About as complicated as making a full dinner with main course, two side dishes and a dessert.
On the flip side, every other machine I've had that was closed, mostly laptops, but I'm thinking of my C64, and my Coco2, when the smallest piece died on those things, right into the trash they went. There's literally nothing you can do to fix them that doesn't involve an engineering degree and a lab.
There is a market, or should I say: there are markets:
* people who often broke their screens (my current boss is at 3 screens in 2 years, and counting)
* enthusiast, early adopters, developpers,...
* There is probably a good way to market it in developing countries too.
I would love having that phone, even more with a firefoxOS running on it. Having that plateform with open hardware specifications would be a huge boon for it to become a viable ecosystem. I could see firefoxOS and windows phone boarding it quite easily if it take.
PS: whereas specifications are open or not, IDK at the moment, not a lot of reliable information being available. Wishful thinking on my part I suppose. Still hoping.
My first 21st century "gadget" (for some obviously arbitrary definition of the term) was an ipod nano. I'm not very sensitive to the niceness of things in general so I was pretty surprised at how much I liked how it looked and felt in my hands.
It was, cold metallic, small, sleek and completely solid. It had no give in it at all and felt like a magic rock. The solidness of it made it feel futuristic. I find that I like my SSD laptop a lot more than the old HDD one for similar reasons. I think it has to do with it not revealing anything about how it works.
I imagine artifacts of the future continuing along these lines. Impenetrable to analysis by the naked A solid mass of synthetic minerals arranged in a very precise way so that electrons are precisely directed this way or that way. But to the naked eye, there is no cause and effect beyond the minimal input and output.
On the opposite side, I can get a lot of enjoyment from messing around with something like a foot-treadle loom or 18th century brass navigation instruments. Even just looking at them is fun. They are complicated enough to be very clever and interesting. Too clever to invent yourself. But, they are still simple enough to understand using your eyes. You can get an "aha!" from seeing the flying shuttle work on a loom. The objects themselves being so common in mythology also adds to the flavor. You can see the incredible potential of adding more gears and levers.
It's an accessible cleverness that you can experience pretty directly. I find it fascinating that space cowboy fiction & steampunk exist. First, future tense nostalgia is an interesting concept. Second, I think it shows a kind of longing for objects that are both futuristic but understandable.
The loom is obviously a human artifact. The ipod is something we intellectually understand to be an artifact, but emotionally it doesn't feel like human one. A magic object doesn't hint at its workings.
Beyond the practical advantages of a modular device, I think there is a steampunk-esque appeal to the idea. We could weld together a brass spaceship using an energy crystal to power the electron sail (both naturally obtained by barter or pilage ).
Riding into the office yesterday i saw a guy on a scooter that had a treadle as the standing platform which he rocked back and forth eith his feet to propel the scooter..
Ugly as sin, dorky, but fascinating and novel and cool all at the same time.
This is absolutely the right direction, but not in the way you think. This shouldn't be branded as a phone -- size and look matter too much. It should be branded the tool of the future, designed for people people in the field: electricians / construction workers / scientists / tinkerers. Let me plug in an altimeter, leveler, or multimeter. That is what is missing on my iPhone, and this is the first thing I've seen modular enough to pull it off.
And, yes, I've been thinking Tricorder this whole time=).
I'm curious to see what I will be able to do with the interconnect myself. For instance, could I rig something up to hook a couple of modules to my laptop or car?
This question was asked at the tech conference yesterday, and they may clarify it in the MDK [0] but the project team seemed to downplay this aspect, preferring to pitch the idea of a "low cost mobile phone for the next billion users."
Still, the modules can be emitters (ie., BT/ZigBe modules) although they were unclear about how module developers would get these certified. And I guess no one is stopping you from adding cables to a module, but the UniPro based and M-PHY current specs wouldn't get you very far... 10cm cable perhaps?
Actually this thing is not entirley new and such tools already exist: there are enough arduino-style boards out there that allow you to create a phone already, as well as a bunch of other useful things: get a gps modules, a gprs module, a keyboard module and a screen module and off you go.
People are viewing this project as a 'lego' phone that sounds great in theory but doesn't charm practically. However manufacturers can take a middle ground approach where future electronics slowly move towards hot swappable components. Upgrading & replacing defective parts shouldn't require a screw driver and perhaps as easy as plugging in a USB cable.
When I'm buying a high end phone & spending $600, I'd want it to last 5-6+ years. However the current ones typically stay relevant for barely 2 years and the residual value is below $200. How about a phone that I'm not scared to drop because if something breaks, I can easily swap out a new LCD, ofcourse at a reasonable cost. Many users like me would be willing to sacrifice the form factor slightly to get the ability to make my device last longer.
However all this goes against how manufacturers make money i.e. make you buy new product frequently & charge an arm & a leg for repairs.
I doubt they can make a good, commercially viable phone straight away. If they just could release a backbone and a starter set of modules at a nexus7-ish price point, that might get things going. They need to get this thing into some people's hands (especially potential module developers) and see what they can do with it.
Also, selling this as a way of long lived phone sounds like a terrible USB. I would put 'easily repairable' above it but the real value is the potential module ecosystem. Without that it's just some form of cheaper and that's a hard promise to keep.
Phone is a relatively small part of what smartphones are. Is the phone a module here? It would be interesting to know what all the starter set modules do.
It's disappointed to see all the cynicism on this thread. Commercial viability aside (come on, who knows), this is a cool fun project with interesting possibilities for making hardware innovation accessible.
There are other models, like sell the razor cheap and charge more for the blades, which can support a product ecosystem, albeit a smaller one than that for grooming products.
Consider that the FOB price for replacement cellphone cameras is under $5 in quantities of $100. The hardware is cheap, the labor of installing it into a phone that needs repair is not. But if you make it user-installable (as here), you can sell the exact same camera for maybe $20-30, with only a minimal increase in the cost of production for the modular package. So this could work out quite nicely for component manufacturers by giving them a small additional revenue stream from enthusiast/hobby buyers.
All those people complaining that it won't be competitive with other phones for consumer dollars are totally missing the point. Of course consumers will continue to prefer all-in-one products from brand name manufacturers like Apple and Samsung, for the same reason that most consumers want a car that Just Works rather one that requires them to be an amateur mechanic.
And yet, there's a thriving retail business in auto parts, because a lot of people do like to hack on their cars or carry out their own repairs. And likewise, there's a market for modular phones among hackers, engineers, high school and college students, and all sorts of other niches, who want flexibility but don't necessarily want to go down the Arduino route with soldering and building their own cases and PCBs. Simple example: stick two camera modules into one of these things, and you have a super cheap 3d camera platform.
This will be absolutely huge in the developing world where utility >> convenience or aesthetics.
As technology continues to shrink more functionality into less space, it crosses the threshold where human limits require the device be at least this big (whatever that size/shape minimum is). A screen can only be so small before it's practically unreadable. A touch area must provide at least so much space between tap targets and accommodate "fat fingers". The box of a phone must be big enough to hold comfortably to an ear. A small matchbox-size device would just plain be too awkward to use.
Seems Apple initiated the unchangeable phone (no swappable battery, extremely tight/solid tolerances) in part to get all that core functionality inside a box that small. Sufficient battery required XYZ volume; making it removable wasted a nontrivial amount of that, affecting talk time & durability.
Now that core functionality can be smaller than the minimum usable size, including battery life acceptable to most users, there's some space again to "waste" on components like pluggable interconnects, module packaging (so a part is not fully exposed when removed), air gaps, etc.
"This here's a good axe. It's had nine handles and three heads."
"This is the last phone I bought. It's had nine batteries, three CPUs, two displays, four radios, ..."
Once upon a time, when I was younger, I felt very strongly that I needed a computer with everything replaceable. I wanted to replace a CPU when it got too slow, new graphics card, upgradable RAM, storage, etc. But I found that in the end while I'd make small upgrades, I still replaced my computers at close to the same rate. That because some standard that was built into the old machine was no longer fast enough or wide enough for newer uses, or an interconnect standard changed (think ISA, to PCI, to PCI-X, to PCI-e) The other reason is while i could upgrade some parts, I couldn't upgrade all the parts, and pretty soon those parts were now two or three years old. They were no longer as reliable as a brand new system.
I wonder with these modular phone ideas, if we're looking at the beige box PC industry all over? And whether it will be a good fit to mobile or whether you'll buy your modular system in a year, and then find in another two years that there is a new modular interconnect version without backwards compatibility, and gradually you won't be able to find modules that work with your current frame, so you have to replace that, and maybe the some of your old modules don't work with the new frame, so you have to replace them at the same time. Like a lot of beige bok PC geek, you'll end up with a drawer of old modules in a drawer that you hardly ever find a need for, but you cant bring yourself to throw them away unless they're actually broke. The smart person will just buy all new modules when they replace the frame (that what most people did when they replaced their beige box, because why upgrade but still carry over that old junky graphics card). Pretty soon your at a point where the primary benefit of modularity in not upgrading pieces, but the ability to spec exactly the phone you want when buying. But in reality there are a lot of phones on the market now, and you can come pretty close.
I don't know that this will be the case, but its how I'd bet it would end up playing out.
I think the PC analogy is wrong. I also framing this as money saving option is wrong.
The potential is in flexibility. Phones are small. Tradeoffs are substantial. Some people would prefer 50% more battery life at the expense of the camera or weight. Maybe someone can make an e-ink screen that will double battery life. Some people might want to spend $800 on the camera.
IMO, that's the benefit.
Commercially, I see this as something can keep buying add ons to. The market of people who buy 2-3 pricey covers for an ipad is legit. People like their phones and add ons might sell because people will just want to buy new things for them.
In that sense, maybe this will extend life a little or partially as you take some old modules with you, but that's not the point. The point is can flexibility let people make a phone they like better and enjoy doing it.
Perhaps, but (at least in Android) existing phone selection gives a pretty wide range of possibilities without incurring the drawbacks of the modular design. Admittedly, you can't buy a phone with high end CPU/memory/storage and low end screen, but I suspect there is a fair amount of predictability in what people will pair together. I think you find a lot of people who would buy a top of the line phone with everything--i.e. the equivalent of a flagship Samsung phone--and a lot of people that that are not spec/capability focused that want it to basically work--who would be happy with most 'free with contract' type phones, and the people that want that unique mix of features are a small minority.
This is my experience with most of the people that I know or work with, and it could be selection bias. But I don't work in a tech hub. I work with people that make low to mid range salaries at a local government agency in one of the poorer parts of the county.
(at least in Android) existing phone selection gives a pretty wide range of possibilities
No, it doesn't. None of the following exist with an up-to-date version of Android (at least 4.3) and medium to high specs (comparable to a Moto X or better):
* A slider form-factor with a physical keyboard. I have one friend who keeps buying old phones to have that, and another who kept her Droid 4 until it broke despite the option of a free upgrade.
* Something roughly iPhone-sized; the Moto X and Sony Z1 Compact are small by Android flagship standards, but considerably wider than iPhones and hard for anyone with hands smaller than the average American male to use one-handed.
* A ruggedized design. I don't mean simply dust and waterproof like recent models from Samsung and Sony, but capable of withstanding significant abuse. Some cases partly compensate, but what I'm thinking of would probably require a thick layer of tempered glass over the screen and a digitizer intended to compensate for the reduction in sensitivity.
I know people who would buy each of these. I'm almost certain that a smartphone manufacturer outside of the top 3 that did a good job making any one of these three options would increase its profits significantly.
I don't think a modular phone factor like shown here solves any of those problems though...
* A sliding keyboard requires pretty intense engineering within the body
* It seems ara is targeting very large and very small sizes, but not something like an iPhone. Even if it does, it doesn't solve the "I want a phone thats size X", it still limits your choice of size. Further, I wouldn't call this[0] "considerably wider".
* These phones are guaranteed to be much more fragile than current phones, that's a tradeoff of modularity.
So really, though I understand your desire, in the context of Project Ara all of these requirements are met better by current available smartphones.
I don't think a modular phone factor like shown here solves any of those problems though
It may not, though I'd be surprised if nobody hacks together a sliding keyboard for this thing. It'll probably be bulky. The fragility issue can be solved by putting a good case over the whole thing. Assuming the overall platform works out to a limited number of sizes, I'd likely offer to sell cases made of various fiber-reinforced polymers[0] with cutouts in user-specified locations.
The Sony Z1 Compact is approximately the size of a Moto X despite having a smaller screen. I think the waterproofing adds some bulk. The Moto G also has a 4.3" screen and is so close to the Moto X in dimensions that it fits comfortably in a case molded around a Moto X, though some cutouts don't align correctly. All of these are a bit too wide for me to use comfortably one-handed, while the iPhone is not. I don't expect modular phones to address that problem effectively, but I wanted to point it out as a segment the current market does not address at all. Based on totally non-scientific anecdotes I've collected by talking to people online, it's the largest of the three segments I mentioned.
How would cases work for a modular design? It might be okay for small modules, but the moment it gets bulky, the phones entire profiles changed, and any normal cases are out.
In the photographs shown, no module other than the extended camera lens sticks out very much. A case that's roughly a rectangular prism, open on one side will be able to enclose many possible configurations.
I agree on the high end CPU, low end screen combo. I don't mean living with a lower end screen to shave 7% off the price of a phone. I doubt this will ever offer that anyway.
I mean more unusual setups like a huge, expensive camera mic to try and turn a tablet into a portable recording editing thing. More sensors. Joysticks. Little feet or wheels and a laser pointer so that your not just stuck on your back when you're in a video call.
I'll be the first person to admit if I'm wrong. I also think that if this product is made, there will be some cool use cases and users currently under-served that will find great benefits form the modular system, but I remain skeptical that there will be enough people positively impacted make up for the possible negatives.
Small point in your thoughtful comment but I wanted to add that I had the exact same sensation when I got the iPod Nano first-gen. I got it as a gift and it only had 8GB capacity, I had 20GB+ of music at the time. Still, I almost decided to keep the nano over a full-sized iPod because it just felt so damn magical. I felt like I had the future in my pocket and I'd rather lose 60% of my music than let it go.
The difference is the base of the Project Ara phone, the exoskeleton, is only $15 to replace. So if they change that, you're looking at paying $15. With PCs, the base still costs $150-200 in most cheap options and significantly more in others.
Google might benefit strategically from a market where phones are commoditized down at the hardware subsystem level. This would further disempower hardware integrators like Samsung.
The analogy is Microsoft:beige box::Google:component phone.
> where phones are commoditized down at the hardware subsystem level
This is already happening with the various Chinese manufacturers and the Mediatek MT65xx platform. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of different models, all slightly different looking and with different dimensions, but based on the same internal reference design with minor changes, often to the point of ROM interchangeability.
I agree but want to add that altbough like you I did not often upgrade my PC, I did replace broken stuff like a fan, power supply, harddrive for a fraction the cost of a new PC. I also extended with extra, not better, hardware like a card reader and bluetooth. Also one or two times I did upgrade (ie memory). Taken together all this probably doubled or tripled the life of my PC and I can see this extrapolated to phones as well.
For instance I'd love to add, say, NFC and Bluetooth LT to my Samsung S2 and use it one or two more years.
heh. you guy really have any hope? just count the number of devices google and its nexus partners released without even a sd card slot! motorola too since the google devices started.
the market demands that fast obsolency and they are evil now. the only thing holding back the nexus one as a strong daily phone is that it have no space for more than 5 modern apps. it does if you hack android 2.3 to install apps on the SD...
anyway. i wouldnt hold my breath. this is being done just to fail and harm other people pursuing it honestly. cynic much? probably. but i am mostly stating facts. how much does a sd slot saved in costs from your $600 phone? nothing. hiw many years its lack cut from the device longevity? more than half.
edit: plus the feature they advertise more is electro magnets! on a device where the biggest concern is battery... and which will have a case anyway that could hold everything together in case they used simple mechanical latches.
Can you clarify what you mean? Maybe not 20, but 15 years ago my dad was mucking around in the guts of our family computer, performing his own upgrades. By the time we got rid of that thing the only original component was the case. And nowadays you can order any piece of hardware you want off the internet and slap it in.
I'd actually love it if this idea extended far enough to let me double my "phone" as an impromptu laptop/desktop. I know that we can use a bluetooth keyboard or whatever and kind of simulate things. But I'd love to carry around a single computing device that I can drop into a cradle at home and it's using my two big desktop monitors and nice keyboard/mouse, and when out and about, head into a coffee shop and swap the screen out for a larger screen and keyboard, and then head onto the subway and just swap the screen back and use it like a phone. Then end of the day, head to the gym and swap out a few parts and have it just play music for me while I work out. Head out for a hike on the weekend and configure it like the Gym, but put in a better GPS unit and a bigger battery or something. Go to the store and swap out the GPS unit for a barcode scanner so I can comparison shop a bit. If something breaks, I can fix it myself. Go home and plug it into an HDMI port and watch movies or play games or something. Want to read a book? Swap out the screen for an e-ink screen. Going on a trip? swap in the GPS device, big battery and the Nokia camera module so I can use my nice lenses and find my way to the sites. Swap the screen for the bigger screen later so I can review and edit my photos for the day.
I could trade my notebook, camera, desktop, console, media devices, mp3 player, e-book reader and tablet in entirely.
But all my data is present for me and I can work on it, context appropriate to the interfaces I have available at that moment.
I wouldn't mind having a few bits and parts floating around my backpack if it gave me the flexibility to do that kind of thing.
I like the modularity idea, I don't know if I'd want to be swapping components five times a day though.
If the idea is just to have the same files/data on all your "different" devices, I think I like the idea of running a central fileserver with that stuff on it, and having separate phone, desktop, etc, that each do two or three things and do them well, and they all mount the fileserver, which has a much storage as you want, gets backed up regularly, is where indexing happens, is where long-running downloads happen. and everything mounting that gets the same files. oh, and a server is less likely to go missing or stolen or soaked.
Your idea is the simplest way to preserve application state between "different" devices, my idea is the best way to preserve saved-file state (and only that) between using different devices.
Your idea has been done to some extent by the Motorola Lapdock, but I don't actually know anything about it.
One of the problems of course with all this mode changing is that software has to support it. Look at all the weeping over supporting a few Android screen sizes, now throw in keyboarding, vs. touchscreen vs. whatever input device and the complexity gets pretty crazy. It would definitely require a big change in software development practices.
You're indeed correct that Moto attempted something similar with the Atrix.
As a onetime Moto Webdock owner though, I'll attest to the fact that the grandparents dream is far from realized. At the time, the phone was simply too underpowered to provide a usable experience running just a browser (outdated Firefox at that). I picked the accessory up on Craigslist and it quickly found a resting place in my closet -- it was neat, but only in the proof of concept sense.
I'd love to see a company attempt something similar with today's hardware. A phone like the Nexus 5 / HTC One could provide a pretty slick experience, given enough RAM.
Raise your hand if you bought an "upgradable" mother board in the 286 and 386 days.... Do you still have it?
I have a computer that still uses some of the same screws that my 486 used. For a long time I kept the original hard disk spinning even though I didn't store stuff on it... But when IDE connectors went away I stopped bothering with keeping it for nostalgia.
Even my case is no longer compatible, the power supply stopped being compatible long ago.
Some of this is "advancements" some of it is just that manufactures want to sell you new stuff.
Houses are about the only thing that are modular and you can say you will only need to buy one... The house I grew up in is nearly 200 years old. So far it hasn't needed to be replaced to do incompatibility.
As someone mourning the fall of the full-qwerty physical keyboard phone (yes there are the new BB phones, but by the next time I upgrade I anticipate that BB will be dead), this gives me hope. There may not be enough people who want them for manufacturers to make whole phones, but maybe there are enough to support a market in quality keyboard modules.
My phone buying thought process: Does this phone have the software I care about? Are apps tested to work with my exact device? Sold.
I do not want to spend a split second thinking about modules or RAM or anything and I'm a very technical person. I cannot imagine my mom dealing with this crap.
What is the market here? I would pay a premium to NOT deal with modules.
I will certainly get one. Think about it like a little prototyping computer platform. I don't know if I'd make it my main phone for the reasons you describe, but I would definitely like a portable battery-powered computing device with modular capabilities, like a little Raspberry Pi that can go in my pocket instead of being stuck on the desk.
Once this is out, you are paying a premium to not deal with modules by not getting one. It's a $50 phone you can swap components in and out of as upgrades become available. To me, that's infinitely better than buying a new $300 smartphone every other year.
But there's also a second appeal. Right now, phones are impenetrable black-boxes. You get what the manufacturer thinks you want. The reason I think a modular phone will become very popular is the same reason the AR-15 is the most popular gun in America: because you can play with it. You can swap parts in and out depending on what you need.
"Oh, I'm going hiking today? Better stick my extra-big battery and wide-field camera into my phone."
"Apple's putting a new zillion-byte SSD in the iPhone 9Q? Well good thing I can just buy the zillion-byte module for my modular phone instead of having to buy a whole new one."
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[ 10.5 ms ] story [ 3687 ms ] threadIt was made like a deck of cards, cpu, display/kbd, battery and cell components could all be swapped out. There even was a camera module for the back. It didn't make it. The main reasons iirc were that people see phones as integrated wholes, that contacts breed failure and that making an integrated phone versus one made out of pieces is simply cheaper.
Curious how this one will fare!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebloks
Just like in software, the interfaces are where the complexity lies.
If it falls much below that unit volume, the scheme implodes because the optional components will not find enough of a market to get manufactured.
In order to succeed, the internal connectivity scheme needs to not go obsolete over at least two, and preferably three product generations.
It also needs to find a market. People still build their own PCs for gaming, for lab automation, and other distinctly minority pursuits. So far, the niche for this product seems to be "people who find the idea attractive but can't articulate an actual need."
This is Hacker News, where people are disproportionately far more likely to buy such a thing than the average consumer. I would expect to see the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 significantly overrepresented here as well; the only people I know in person who own them are hackers.
PhoneBloks was just a "product" of designer's imagination, nothing more. All he did was to think about "LEGO-phone" and make a catchy animation describing the idea - the idea that wasn't even unique or new, as similar ones (together with 3D-printed or homemade cases, which were later actually realized) were already appearing few years ago on Openmoko mailing lists triggered by GTA04 motherboard upgrade for Neo Freerunner.
At some point every piece of the phone will have been exchanged, making it a completely new phone.
invents the question of the philosopher's modular mobile phone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change
"I remain highly skeptical that a modular design can compete in a product category where size, weight, and battery life are at such a premium. Even if they can bring something to market, why would any normal person be interested in a phone like this?"
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/04/15/project-ara
I think consumers actually like a little choice in their products now. I mean, take a look at the apple laptop website.
Also, I could imagine vendors offering different phone presets (e.g. battery life, photo-taking, media consumption) and then letting the customer further customize it if they want.
For a given sized phone, a replaceable battery is necessarily smaller capacity than a fixed equivalent, due to space wasted on additional housings, clips and connectors.
I have a hard time keeping unified units intact and working, much less letting my family near a Lego kit that needs to be 100% assembled to work properly...
Weight matters? I have never heard "I wish my phone was lighter" from anyone, anywhere. In fact I've heard from several who think a heavier phone means it's "better made".
Battery life - Again my Android friends (and a few 5c friends) suffer from poor battery life - How would a phone where you could easily swap for a new/better battery be inferior?
Gruber should remind himself of the first generation of pretty much any tech product. Bulky, ugly, and clumsy could describe a lot of projects that push technology to it's limits.
I can give you bigger and thicker since I would expect those too. Neither is really a problem though. One of the benefits of the otterbox case for my Galaxy G3 is that it made the phone thicker, and it's already on the big side.
Heavier though will probably depend on the modules you choose, and ugly, well I thought what they were showing looked kind of good.
Personally, a lack of a SD card is one of the reasons I didn't get the Nexus or an iPhone. There are people that want these types of features and they win when comparing with alternatives.
There are about 900m Android phones out there. That means if you assume only 10% of the market might be interested in a particular variant of phone, your total addressable market is still 90 million (and growing).
My instinct is that this level of customisation is probably a relatively niche thing but - as outlined above - that doesn't mean that there isn't room for it to be commercially successful.
If you had to pay say $600-$800 for a phone upfront, one is upgradable/repairable and the other is not (but faster/sexier) I think some (maybe many) would choose the former.
Nope. You just happen to know people who can afford to toss an $800 laptop. For most of the 'lower middle class' people I know purchasing a laptop is a big deal and only happens once every 3/4/5 years. Even then they don't spend more than £400. Even when their laptop is practically unusable through age, damaged parts, viruses etc. they continue to use it because £400/$800/a new laptop is a lot of money.
2-3 years ago I got new sony led tv and my wife was under the impression it would be our TV for the next 10-15 years... if major components don't go out in the next 1-3 years i will be happily suprised
The point is: A barebone model for 50 bucks that you could transform in a high-end device expending more money on it when you can afford it.
Also... need more battery life? Why not replace that extra RAM memory module for battery one? Or even... why not to replace the 4 Gb RAM module for one with 1Gb + more battery?
And they have already acknowledged they plan on having "effort free" choices available for consumers. Probably have a "about the same as a Samsung" option, a cheap option that has the important bells and maybe a minimal option you can build off of.
Wouldn't it be nice to have an easily hot swappable battery with a tiny internal battery in the phone so you wouldn't even have to turn it off to do so?
Your anecdotal evidence is about as valid as mine, and I can guarantee you that weight matters. Tactile feel matters. Looks, of course matter.
In all these cases, a modular device fares poorly compared to an integrated one. This is a handheld device - can you not imagine the amount of dirt and grime that would cake up between the module gaps if you don't have a case on the device? And if you do have a case, now you have to uncase to switch around the modules.
The era of modularity is past, or not yet ready to come back.
I don't see weight, tactile feel or looks on the list.
For those with cases, I doubt most even know what their phone really "feels" like, let alone actually weighs or even looks like.
As far as having to remove the case to swap a hardware component .. I don't think that's a major hurdle, we're not talking about a daily, weekly or even monthly task that would make that a pain.
I think it would be really foolish to believe that aesthetics don't play a huge role in smartphone purchasing decisions.
A phone that is bulky and has a large screen would be impractical. That's why size matters.
I don't really know who they are targetting with this device or their anticipated volume, so it is hard to say whether this will be "successful" or not. It seems certain to me that this is not a mass-market offering, though.
I've got one myself and it works exactly as you describe -- heavier, nearly twice as thick, but with roughly twice as much juice.
If it is properly though out and with the ability to get high end performance on BOM + change prices ... they may have a winner.
For instance, people could -- in theory -- build their own computers with a bunch of modular components, but instead a lot of them buy a Mac or some other variation of all-in-one solution.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/ and with the influx of new people in PC gaming with self build rigs - the custom PC market is quite healthy right now.
Now am I saying that there is no market for this, absolutely not, but this in no way will become the standard for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one to me, is time. I used to build all my PC's, taking the time to compare parts, read reviews, check out overclockability, and look for deals and get the best bang for my buck, but as I have gotten older, I just want a machine that works, my disdain for everything Apple, has completely turned around, I absolutely love my Macs now, not because I think Apple and Steve are gods gift to computing, but because they work, they maintain resale value, and compared to PC hardware, they are superior.
With this project, your SoC - which is your CPU, motherboard, networking, memory and baseband chip all in one - is still just one package. Yet you can easily supplement other varieties of packages for displays, storage, batteries, cameras. Each of these things are quite well understood by many casual users.
It is a good old pocket computer, and it is modular, and mine may (or may not) have a telephony module.
I have a Galaxy Note, I think I use it as a phone twice a week on average. I use it as a HN browser, a camera, a podcast downloader and listener, a navigation, a game console, an e-reader, a translator, for contacts and calendar, and phone calls. Having a big screen is helpful in 9 of these 10 activities. Being big is annoying in 1 of them.
Moreover a big device has a much bigger battery, thus a somewhat better battery life (only somewhat because the screen is bigger too, and you use it more.)
I can't believe people are giving Gruber's arguments the time of day on a news site for hackers.
So in the early days of a new market/category of product, the products are highly integrated, for several reasons. One is that the market is still new, so there isn't much of an "ecosystem" to begin with. Another is that the company with the "first mover's advantage" wants to keep stuff proprietary as much as possible, and another is that the product still kind of "sucks" in some areas (camera, battery life, in early days of the iPhone for example - compared to the traditional competition). So they need to make everything work as tightly as possible, to squeeze all the possible optimization out of it.
But eventually, the market becomes mature, the ecosystem grows, and the products become "good enough" for most people. So much of that extreme optimization or need to keep everything proprietary and in-house isn't needed anymore, and you actually start getting some advantages from the modularization of the market, such as buying a better modem than you can make from a "modem company", and so on.
For a while I wasn't sure this was going to happen to the smartphone market (ignoring the fact that there has been an increasing trend towards customization through colors and whanot), because for one the smartphone is a very tighly put together product, and it's hard to imagine how it could've been separated into a dozen different pieces without being junk, and two, for a while the trend was towards increasing "closeness" of devices, rather than openness.
But it seems it's going to happen, and ARA looks just about right (I wasn't a big fan of the Phonebloks pin-model). Still, even if the strategy here is "correct", and most likely on the right side of history, Google will still need to excel at execution, and make sure using such a phone gives very few disadvantages compared to a regular phone, but many more advantages (being able to use whatever camera you want, without buying a $700 phone every year, and so on). Otherwise, people could be turned off by the initial version, and then it will be a lot harder to convince them what a good idea this is. But for now I'm optimistic.
[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating-Sustainin...
Not sure about this one, seems like the opposite to me. Twenty years ago, PC's were very modular, and it was very common to add/upgrade a sound card, memory, cpu, video card etc. Fast forward to now, and for the most common computing devices (think tablets and smartphones), there is almost zero modularity or upgradability. Even with current PC's (i.e. mostly laptops), it's increasingly limited.
The same trend is apparent in other similar technology. For example with analog TV, people could add a PAL block if their TV was NTSC or SECAM. Upgrading your car used to be significantly easier etc.
"Hugh Trevor-Roper is supposed to have said that 'history teaches us nothing except that something will happen', and this applies pretty well to tech: this is so young and so fast-changing an industry that drawing parallels is more misleading than helpful."
Feels about right to me.
Until now, smart phones/tablets have had little in the way of peripherals. Some headsets, keyboards, memory cards, etc., but people seem to be clamoring for certain peripherals above all others. They seem less concerned about CPU types, just like the in Mac and PC world. Key peripherals seem to be camera and some kind of "geekport"/internet of things.
I don't see a need to modularize every part of the phone a la PCs, but to expand the peripherals would help. It might be as simple as adding extra USB ports.
Integration is crucial for meeting consumer needs when the tech was not as good: the first iPhone had a tiny CPU and GPU, but they managed to squeeze adequate performance by connecting everything with extreme efficiency.
But once it's good enough, people start to worry about other factors - like I want a big battery, but I don't need 3G (or vice versa). Customization, not just replacing broken bits. Here, a modular approach shines. But it's less efficient, so there needs to be spare power. The key driver is that users want customization more than they want extra compute power.
Android is modular, compared to iOS, and it's worked out well - once phone got powerful enough. It couldn't have in the very earliest days, because the spare power wasn't there. Hardware modularity is the next step. It may be a little early, but I think it's clear that high-end phones have wildly overshot mainstream needs (a quad-core HD phone!? what a boondoggle). Actually, today mid- and low-end phones are perfectly fine for most people.
PS: this pressure will also drive the next category - whether it's iWatches or iGlasses or something else, I don't know, but it will be smaller, more convenient, cheaper, easier to use - and there won't be power to spare in such a small form-factor. Therefore, it's likely that Apple will do it (hence the i's) since they are the company most integrated across all the levels of hardware, silicon, OS, apps, appstore. They are best placed to squeeze the needed performance (doesn't guarantee they will though).
I am curious about what YC partners think of Christensen's modularity vs integrated (and his other theories), since they are VCs, in the business of predicting technology. But I've never heard them even discuss it...
Similar for Moore's Crossing the Chasm
I hope it gets some traction. I'm seeing a lot of sameness in high-spec Android phones, and something like this might help manufacturers learn what kinds of variations might sell without having to take the risk of mass-producing and marketing a new model.
P.S. - if any manufacturers are reading this, I want a high-spec Android phone the size of an iPhone. My Nexus 5 is somewhat uncomfortable in my pocket and too hard to use one-handed due to its size.
I commend Motorola for an excellent job eliminating non-screen area on the front of the Moto X. It's a very space-efficient device in that regard, but my complaint is about reaching all areas of a touchscreen with my thumb while holding it in one hand, and nothing fixes that like a smaller touchscreen.
3 mm taller than the iPhone:
http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5753&idPhone2=...
Moto X is 5mm taller:
http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5601&idPhone2=...
The iPhone is not the most compact phone around, and by compact I don't mean small. It is smaller, just not very compact, so less efficient screen wise.
Also the market has shown a preference for size and look over replaceable parts, so not surprised Google went that way.
Has it? Samsung is the largest seller of Android phones by a significant margin, and most of Samsung's phones have replaceable batteries and SD cards. This comes with a cost, in that most reviews I've read complain that the removable back panel on Samsung phones looks and feels cheap.
I suspect Google was motivated by some combination of cost and a desire to encourage reliance on web services rather than on-device storage.
I used my T-Mobile G2 until it died a month ago, and had to do an emergency replacement, which ended up being a Nexus 5. I'm going absolutely insane not being able to just type without thinking about it. When you have to think about your input and often correct it, you are no longer able to simply stream your thoughts, and each micro-interruption is actually quite a distraction from getting things done. It's frustrating.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvCXOXQ0f7c&feature=youtu.be&a=
I remember computers built in the 90s and 2000s, touting their modular construction and never having to buy a new system again. I wonder if those machines are still in operation?
I think what would guarantee longevity is something that is rock-solid good, inexpensive, repairable, and easy to develop on. I'm thinking of track records of computers like the Commodore 64, iMac, or in vehicles like the beetle, video game consoles, ipod, iphone etc.
It'd be more marketable as a device with easily replaceable components, as mentioned above; easily replacing a screen or battery would be convenient for the more clumsy amongst us.
Did these actually exist as a specific product, or are you just referring to all computers that weren't made by Apple?
It's not too technical and not too hard to do. About as complicated as making a full dinner with main course, two side dishes and a dessert.
On the flip side, every other machine I've had that was closed, mostly laptops, but I'm thinking of my C64, and my Coco2, when the smallest piece died on those things, right into the trash they went. There's literally nothing you can do to fix them that doesn't involve an engineering degree and a lab.
That doesn't seem to be how they're marketing it, though.
I would love having that phone, even more with a firefoxOS running on it. Having that plateform with open hardware specifications would be a huge boon for it to become a viable ecosystem. I could see firefoxOS and windows phone boarding it quite easily if it take.
PS: whereas specifications are open or not, IDK at the moment, not a lot of reliable information being available. Wishful thinking on my part I suppose. Still hoping.
My first 21st century "gadget" (for some obviously arbitrary definition of the term) was an ipod nano. I'm not very sensitive to the niceness of things in general so I was pretty surprised at how much I liked how it looked and felt in my hands.
It was, cold metallic, small, sleek and completely solid. It had no give in it at all and felt like a magic rock. The solidness of it made it feel futuristic. I find that I like my SSD laptop a lot more than the old HDD one for similar reasons. I think it has to do with it not revealing anything about how it works.
I imagine artifacts of the future continuing along these lines. Impenetrable to analysis by the naked A solid mass of synthetic minerals arranged in a very precise way so that electrons are precisely directed this way or that way. But to the naked eye, there is no cause and effect beyond the minimal input and output.
On the opposite side, I can get a lot of enjoyment from messing around with something like a foot-treadle loom or 18th century brass navigation instruments. Even just looking at them is fun. They are complicated enough to be very clever and interesting. Too clever to invent yourself. But, they are still simple enough to understand using your eyes. You can get an "aha!" from seeing the flying shuttle work on a loom. The objects themselves being so common in mythology also adds to the flavor. You can see the incredible potential of adding more gears and levers.
It's an accessible cleverness that you can experience pretty directly. I find it fascinating that space cowboy fiction & steampunk exist. First, future tense nostalgia is an interesting concept. Second, I think it shows a kind of longing for objects that are both futuristic but understandable.
The loom is obviously a human artifact. The ipod is something we intellectually understand to be an artifact, but emotionally it doesn't feel like human one. A magic object doesn't hint at its workings.
Beyond the practical advantages of a modular device, I think there is a steampunk-esque appeal to the idea. We could weld together a brass spaceship using an energy crystal to power the electron sail (both naturally obtained by barter or pilage ).
* Not responsible for possible bankruptcy/ divorce/ loss of employment resulting from acting on above advice
http://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/
Ugly as sin, dorky, but fascinating and novel and cool all at the same time.
And, yes, I've been thinking Tricorder this whole time=).
Still, the modules can be emitters (ie., BT/ZigBe modules) although they were unclear about how module developers would get these certified. And I guess no one is stopping you from adding cables to a module, but the UniPro based and M-PHY current specs wouldn't get you very far... 10cm cable perhaps?
[0] http://www.projectara.com/mdk/
When I'm buying a high end phone & spending $600, I'd want it to last 5-6+ years. However the current ones typically stay relevant for barely 2 years and the residual value is below $200. How about a phone that I'm not scared to drop because if something breaks, I can easily swap out a new LCD, ofcourse at a reasonable cost. Many users like me would be willing to sacrifice the form factor slightly to get the ability to make my device last longer.
However all this goes against how manufacturers make money i.e. make you buy new product frequently & charge an arm & a leg for repairs.
I doubt they can make a good, commercially viable phone straight away. If they just could release a backbone and a starter set of modules at a nexus7-ish price point, that might get things going. They need to get this thing into some people's hands (especially potential module developers) and see what they can do with it.
Also, selling this as a way of long lived phone sounds like a terrible USB. I would put 'easily repairable' above it but the real value is the potential module ecosystem. Without that it's just some form of cheaper and that's a hard promise to keep.
Phone is a relatively small part of what smartphones are. Is the phone a module here? It would be interesting to know what all the starter set modules do.
It's disappointed to see all the cynicism on this thread. Commercial viability aside (come on, who knows), this is a cool fun project with interesting possibilities for making hardware innovation accessible.
Consider that the FOB price for replacement cellphone cameras is under $5 in quantities of $100. The hardware is cheap, the labor of installing it into a phone that needs repair is not. But if you make it user-installable (as here), you can sell the exact same camera for maybe $20-30, with only a minimal increase in the cost of production for the modular package. So this could work out quite nicely for component manufacturers by giving them a small additional revenue stream from enthusiast/hobby buyers.
All those people complaining that it won't be competitive with other phones for consumer dollars are totally missing the point. Of course consumers will continue to prefer all-in-one products from brand name manufacturers like Apple and Samsung, for the same reason that most consumers want a car that Just Works rather one that requires them to be an amateur mechanic.
And yet, there's a thriving retail business in auto parts, because a lot of people do like to hack on their cars or carry out their own repairs. And likewise, there's a market for modular phones among hackers, engineers, high school and college students, and all sorts of other niches, who want flexibility but don't necessarily want to go down the Arduino route with soldering and building their own cases and PCBs. Simple example: stick two camera modules into one of these things, and you have a super cheap 3d camera platform.
This will be absolutely huge in the developing world where utility >> convenience or aesthetics.
Seems Apple initiated the unchangeable phone (no swappable battery, extremely tight/solid tolerances) in part to get all that core functionality inside a box that small. Sufficient battery required XYZ volume; making it removable wasted a nontrivial amount of that, affecting talk time & durability.
Now that core functionality can be smaller than the minimum usable size, including battery life acceptable to most users, there's some space again to "waste" on components like pluggable interconnects, module packaging (so a part is not fully exposed when removed), air gaps, etc.
"This here's a good axe. It's had nine handles and three heads."
"This is the last phone I bought. It's had nine batteries, three CPUs, two displays, four radios, ..."
I wonder with these modular phone ideas, if we're looking at the beige box PC industry all over? And whether it will be a good fit to mobile or whether you'll buy your modular system in a year, and then find in another two years that there is a new modular interconnect version without backwards compatibility, and gradually you won't be able to find modules that work with your current frame, so you have to replace that, and maybe the some of your old modules don't work with the new frame, so you have to replace them at the same time. Like a lot of beige bok PC geek, you'll end up with a drawer of old modules in a drawer that you hardly ever find a need for, but you cant bring yourself to throw them away unless they're actually broke. The smart person will just buy all new modules when they replace the frame (that what most people did when they replaced their beige box, because why upgrade but still carry over that old junky graphics card). Pretty soon your at a point where the primary benefit of modularity in not upgrading pieces, but the ability to spec exactly the phone you want when buying. But in reality there are a lot of phones on the market now, and you can come pretty close.
I don't know that this will be the case, but its how I'd bet it would end up playing out.
The potential is in flexibility. Phones are small. Tradeoffs are substantial. Some people would prefer 50% more battery life at the expense of the camera or weight. Maybe someone can make an e-ink screen that will double battery life. Some people might want to spend $800 on the camera.
IMO, that's the benefit.
Commercially, I see this as something can keep buying add ons to. The market of people who buy 2-3 pricey covers for an ipad is legit. People like their phones and add ons might sell because people will just want to buy new things for them.
In that sense, maybe this will extend life a little or partially as you take some old modules with you, but that's not the point. The point is can flexibility let people make a phone they like better and enjoy doing it.
This is my experience with most of the people that I know or work with, and it could be selection bias. But I don't work in a tech hub. I work with people that make low to mid range salaries at a local government agency in one of the poorer parts of the county.
No, it doesn't. None of the following exist with an up-to-date version of Android (at least 4.3) and medium to high specs (comparable to a Moto X or better):
* A slider form-factor with a physical keyboard. I have one friend who keeps buying old phones to have that, and another who kept her Droid 4 until it broke despite the option of a free upgrade.
* Something roughly iPhone-sized; the Moto X and Sony Z1 Compact are small by Android flagship standards, but considerably wider than iPhones and hard for anyone with hands smaller than the average American male to use one-handed.
* A ruggedized design. I don't mean simply dust and waterproof like recent models from Samsung and Sony, but capable of withstanding significant abuse. Some cases partly compensate, but what I'm thinking of would probably require a thick layer of tempered glass over the screen and a digitizer intended to compensate for the reduction in sensitivity.
I know people who would buy each of these. I'm almost certain that a smartphone manufacturer outside of the top 3 that did a good job making any one of these three options would increase its profits significantly.
* A sliding keyboard requires pretty intense engineering within the body
* It seems ara is targeting very large and very small sizes, but not something like an iPhone. Even if it does, it doesn't solve the "I want a phone thats size X", it still limits your choice of size. Further, I wouldn't call this[0] "considerably wider".
* These phones are guaranteed to be much more fragile than current phones, that's a tradeoff of modularity.
So really, though I understand your desire, in the context of Project Ara all of these requirements are met better by current available smartphones.
[0] http://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Sony-Xperia-Z1-Compact...
It may not, though I'd be surprised if nobody hacks together a sliding keyboard for this thing. It'll probably be bulky. The fragility issue can be solved by putting a good case over the whole thing. Assuming the overall platform works out to a limited number of sizes, I'd likely offer to sell cases made of various fiber-reinforced polymers[0] with cutouts in user-specified locations.
The Sony Z1 Compact is approximately the size of a Moto X despite having a smaller screen. I think the waterproofing adds some bulk. The Moto G also has a 4.3" screen and is so close to the Moto X in dimensions that it fits comfortably in a case molded around a Moto X, though some cutouts don't align correctly. All of these are a bit too wide for me to use comfortably one-handed, while the iPhone is not. I don't expect modular phones to address that problem effectively, but I wanted to point it out as a segment the current market does not address at all. Based on totally non-scientific anecdotes I've collected by talking to people online, it's the largest of the three segments I mentioned.
[0]http://i.imgur.com/wcLcKqG.jpg
I mean more unusual setups like a huge, expensive camera mic to try and turn a tablet into a portable recording editing thing. More sensors. Joysticks. Little feet or wheels and a laser pointer so that your not just stuck on your back when you're in a video call.
The analogy is Microsoft:beige box::Google:component phone.
This is already happening with the various Chinese manufacturers and the Mediatek MT65xx platform. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of different models, all slightly different looking and with different dimensions, but based on the same internal reference design with minor changes, often to the point of ROM interchangeability.
For instance I'd love to add, say, NFC and Bluetooth LT to my Samsung S2 and use it one or two more years.
the market demands that fast obsolency and they are evil now. the only thing holding back the nexus one as a strong daily phone is that it have no space for more than 5 modern apps. it does if you hack android 2.3 to install apps on the SD...
anyway. i wouldnt hold my breath. this is being done just to fail and harm other people pursuing it honestly. cynic much? probably. but i am mostly stating facts. how much does a sd slot saved in costs from your $600 phone? nothing. hiw many years its lack cut from the device longevity? more than half.
edit: plus the feature they advertise more is electro magnets! on a device where the biggest concern is battery... and which will have a case anyway that could hold everything together in case they used simple mechanical latches.
I think this could work for business use. But the consumer equation is tricky. Phones are fashion. Also phones take a lot of abuse.
I could trade my notebook, camera, desktop, console, media devices, mp3 player, e-book reader and tablet in entirely.
But all my data is present for me and I can work on it, context appropriate to the interfaces I have available at that moment.
I wouldn't mind having a few bits and parts floating around my backpack if it gave me the flexibility to do that kind of thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge
If the idea is just to have the same files/data on all your "different" devices, I think I like the idea of running a central fileserver with that stuff on it, and having separate phone, desktop, etc, that each do two or three things and do them well, and they all mount the fileserver, which has a much storage as you want, gets backed up regularly, is where indexing happens, is where long-running downloads happen. and everything mounting that gets the same files. oh, and a server is less likely to go missing or stolen or soaked.
Your idea is the simplest way to preserve application state between "different" devices, my idea is the best way to preserve saved-file state (and only that) between using different devices.
Your idea has been done to some extent by the Motorola Lapdock, but I don't actually know anything about it.
As a onetime Moto Webdock owner though, I'll attest to the fact that the grandparents dream is far from realized. At the time, the phone was simply too underpowered to provide a usable experience running just a browser (outdated Firefox at that). I picked the accessory up on Craigslist and it quickly found a resting place in my closet -- it was neat, but only in the proof of concept sense.
I'd love to see a company attempt something similar with today's hardware. A phone like the Nexus 5 / HTC One could provide a pretty slick experience, given enough RAM.
I have a computer that still uses some of the same screws that my 486 used. For a long time I kept the original hard disk spinning even though I didn't store stuff on it... But when IDE connectors went away I stopped bothering with keeping it for nostalgia.
Even my case is no longer compatible, the power supply stopped being compatible long ago.
Some of this is "advancements" some of it is just that manufactures want to sell you new stuff.
Houses are about the only thing that are modular and you can say you will only need to buy one... The house I grew up in is nearly 200 years old. So far it hasn't needed to be replaced to do incompatibility.
My phone buying thought process: Does this phone have the software I care about? Are apps tested to work with my exact device? Sold.
I do not want to spend a split second thinking about modules or RAM or anything and I'm a very technical person. I cannot imagine my mom dealing with this crap.
What is the market here? I would pay a premium to NOT deal with modules.
But there's also a second appeal. Right now, phones are impenetrable black-boxes. You get what the manufacturer thinks you want. The reason I think a modular phone will become very popular is the same reason the AR-15 is the most popular gun in America: because you can play with it. You can swap parts in and out depending on what you need.
"Oh, I'm going hiking today? Better stick my extra-big battery and wide-field camera into my phone."
"Apple's putting a new zillion-byte SSD in the iPhone 9Q? Well good thing I can just buy the zillion-byte module for my modular phone instead of having to buy a whole new one."
And a million other examples.