Google’s Project Ara is such a drastic departure from the hardware designs that make up mainstream smartphones that it’s pretty impressive to see just how swiftly progress is moving forward on the effort. From the earliest announcement back in the fall of last year, we’ve moved on to developer conferences and the release of the Ara Module Developers Kit. Now it’s nearly time for Ara’s next phase to begin, as Google prepares to distribute the dev boards that will let hardware makers continue with work towards creating the modules that will go into Ara devices.
Will this project go anywhere? No idea. Will it change the smartphone world forever? Probably not. Is it awesome? Pretty much, yeah. Runaway success or no, I like this crazy idea.
*waits anxiously for tech sites to get their hands on it*
-“…Will it change the smartphone world forever? Probably not. ”
Does your mind too narrowed ?
I see *a lot* of things possible with Ara modules.
Don’t you ever play with famous bricks when you were a child ?
Always follow the instructions ?
Not as long as we have our… [makes a rainbow with ur hands] …imagination!
😉
I am interested in what you find compelling and how you think they are going to solve all the problems.
Quickly I see these problems: it will always be larger, it will always use more energy, it will always be more fragile, it will need a complex software stack, there will be a lot of duplication within the phone, there will be more waste, it will be very difficult for consumers to use, I have never seen this work
For phones we want small, beautiful, light, powerful and modular is really not that interesting because we replace these devices quite often for much better devices anyway
However, this all seems to make perfect sense for a car where replacement cycles are MUCH slower and a modular 10 Euro GPS component, a 5 Euro BlueTooth chip and a 20 Euro Navigation component would be absolute gamechangers!
I know that we are heading towards a “cars are just displays for our smartphone” world, but with Ara it doesn’t have to be that complicated
If you just give the car a good usable docking station for multiple devices you don’t have to buy anything else for the car. Just use your device like a tablet, gps, phone, mp3 player etc. in the dock where it charges and connects to your car systems like speakers, breaks, air-co, extra antennas your phone can use. If you really want you could just buy a tablet and integrate it in the dock permanently. After 3 to 5 years you just buy a new tablet and dock it there.
Docking stations need to have a certain size, location, connector, etc. Those things are hard to standardize and would cost more than Ara is supposed to be.
Having a cigarette-2-usb (or similar for Apple), a built-in screen, speakers, etc are all you need and are already in most cars. The rest can be through bluetooth
brakes? O_o