As if Moto X with customizable colors wasn’t enough, Google’s Motorola has teamed up with Phonebloks to create a ‘modular’ smartphone. Motorola calls it the Project Ara.
Project Ara plans to create an endoskeleton where the modules like the battery, camera, processor or a sensor can be attached to. The resulting design looks like something taken from a Windows 8 Start Screen.
| The Project Ara concept. Photo by Motorola. |
On the other hand, Phonebloks has been working on the concept too. What they came up was sort of a ‘lego style phone’.
With the Phonebloks concept, the modules are called bloks and attach to a base that looks like a plastic with a lot of holes in it. This looks cool but Motorola’s concept looks better and more technically feasible.
Phonebloks also developed the concept of a Blokstore that can be thought of as the Playstore for hardware. Need a better camera? Purchase a 41MP camera blok from the Blokstore!
| The Phonebloks concept. |
One comment that I encountered is that most smartphone users doesn’t really care about the hardware on their device as long as they have a good experience with it. For example, it doesn’t matter if you have a dual core or quad core processor as long as you don’t experience lag issues.
Contrary to that, I do care about the specs of my phone. That might be because I am inclined to gadgets and this sort of stuff.
Project Ara is like building a custom PC using a motherboard, video card, system unit case, monitor and other parts from various brands that you like.
DIY fans will surely like Project Ara and Phonebloks but I’m not sure with regular smartphone users.
