Project Ara Lives: Google's Modular Phone
wired.com
wired.com
r/android seems unimpressed because many of the initially removable components are no longer removable (at least, as indicated by marketing videos) [1]. However, it seems silly to me to get upset about this because this is a Developer Edition and Google clearly had to limit the scope of the project in order to ship. Though, one wonders if there are physical limits causing the CPU, GPU, battery, and display to be non-removable. We'll see.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/4k9bwr/project_ara...
Also, screens are what most often break on a device, because glass don't deal well with sudden applications of force. Making them modular with a defined attachment system would be godsend for many butterfingers and parents.
All in all, what they are presenting now is things that can be done USB, WIFI or bluetooth.
But if you knew, for example, that your camera could be used with your next two CPUs, you might make a longer term investment in a higher-quality camera.
One of the big criticisms of the LG G5's claims of "modularity" was that the battery couldn't be hot swapped, so it seems that some level of internal battery is necessary for modularity.
It's not that "many" of the components aren't available, it's all the components anyone cared about. It seems like you won't be able to swap out the CPU, GPU, RAM, battery or screen. So if you want a phone with a faster CPU, you need to buy an entirely new phone, which goes against all the hype for these modular phone plans.
From the venturebeat article linked below: "The idea of Ara is to ensure that your devices are future-proofed, meaning that the whole “upgrade every two years” mentality is no longer a thing. ". This certainly isn't true. Though I guess it could be slightly cheaper, since you would be just buying a frame, and could pop in your old camera module.
There also aren't any modules being shown that can clue you into what the potential is. The only thing recognizable is a camera module, and what I'm guessing is a small e-ink display., every other module is just an unlabeled colored/textured rectangle. In every article about it the only example ever used is a camera.
The module idea actually seems really cool, a standard way for anyone to create hardware for your phone. But I think the "modular phone. Upgrade one bit a time. Never obsolete." marketing angle is a blatant lie.
Edit: I agree with one of the jokes in that Reddit thread about this
Here's what I want for my six modules:
1. Camera
2. Battery
3. Battery
4. Battery
5. Battery
6. Battery
>“The key here,” Camargo says, “is to develop the functionality you don’t get on your smartphone today. I’ll give you the smartphone, so you don’t have to worry about it.”
It sounds to me the reason their "dev kit" includes so much "out of the box" is to spur development of newer more interesting modules.
Like you said, we all know that camera, storage, battery modules will be there, but they are pushing to see what others can come up with (blood sugar testers, credit-card readers, touchpads, temperature sensors, etc...)
and replacement inertial sensors, those always seem to break on me.
edit: actually, it would be cool to put an FPGA on there.
SDR, Storage, bigger/better Speakers, more USB/whatever ports, HDMI output, video Projector, JTAG (why not?), RFID
edit: oh, temperature/barometer built into the device would be pretty cool too.
Anyways that's just a stream of conscious I came up with in 5 minutes of noodling. There is potential. Maybe not as much for day to day, but definitely options for professionals that make their living outdoors.
My thinking was also that this makes a great platform for professional tools that are currently standalone devices. Multimeters, surveying equipment, thermal inspection tools. Maybe a microscope or even a microfluidics device.
> It's not that "many" of the components aren't available, it's all the components anyone cared about. It seems like you won't be able to swap out the CPU, GPU, RAM, battery or screen.
The article addresses this directly:
"After lots of research and testing, they made a big decision: rather than turn every single piece of the phone into modules, from the processor to the RAM to the hard drive, they’d consolidate all that into the standard frame. They found that people don't care about, or want to think about, the processor in their phone. And they especially don't want to worry about it being compatible with all their apps. Users just want a good phone with good specs that does all the basics well, and then they want a place to play on top of that."
They did the research. It turned out that people didn't care about those components after all.
If you think your research is better, build the product.
And yes, that was exactly what everyone was saying from the beginning: it's infeasible to do what Ara was dreamt up to do.
"Which brings us to the most important question still facing Project Ara: what the hell kind of modules are people going to build? Woolridge and his team took their user research to the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona in February, where they started showing it to potential partners: carriers, tech companies, fashion brands, everyone.
Turns out they all have ideas. Better speakers, flashlights, panic buttons, fitness trackers, projectors, app-shortcut buttons, kickstands, a million other things. Some are incredibly high-tech—pro-level cameras clearly fascinate the Ara team, and they all get excited at the idea of replacing my hideous tape recorder with a microphone module—but some aren’t. Bertrand shows me a small compact case for storing makeup, and a small hollow pillbox. They’re also building “style” modules, which don’t do anything except look nice. Apparently, when given the opportunity to make anything that plugs into their phone, people come up with some pretty useless ideas."
Aka the people whose weird priorities got us to this position (needing/wanting Ara) to begin with?
>If you think your research is better, build the product.
Or not.
I'm all for experimentation, but hardware is always tricky, and the original idea - open source hardware - has always been problematic.
It looks like the cost of module development is going to be way outside the budget of individuals, security is going to be an issue, and unless the platform builds a big ecosystem very quickly - possible, but unlikely - there's going to be little incentive for companies to join up.
ARA makes perfect sense as a concept phone for hardware research, but I'm less convinced it can ever be a viable popular commercial product.
I've been saying since the announcement of Ara (and even earlier with that Phonebloks Kickstarter) that it will not work.
So if you'd like to put it that way... I guess my research was better. Also, I have not built a modular phone, but neither has Google. Since I didn't spend 2 years not building the phone, I guess my non-existent product is better too.
Oh well.
The disadvantage is that you are still carrying the smaller screen without using it, so it adds to the weight/volume of the device.
And shipping this as a dev device will limit the scope of ideas developers will implement.
> “The key here,” Camargo says, “is to develop the functionality you don’t get on your smartphone today. I’ll give you the smartphone, so you don’t have to worry about it.”
They are including an entire phone as the "base" in order to get developers to create new and interesting modules for it.
Everyone and anyone can make a battery, or an SD card reader, they want to see what other things people can come up with.
'many' is CPU+GPU+RAM, which was going to be a single module, but now is part of the frame, right?
It doesn't have to be just a passive box; it could have a companion app and door open sensor. I'm using a separate device for that: http://www.amazon.com/Reizen-Vibrating-Five-Alarm-Pill/dp/B0...
Not going to disable my adblocker just to read a story. I consider it to be an anti-malware tool at this point.
The addon says it blocked 32 elements.
But I'm using Ka-Block on Safari OS X
This is underrated, at least in the article. People love customizing. They'll spend money on that. Wood, gold, ceramic, organic-whatever, glass-with-bits-of-Holy-Land, and on and on. Even for basic parts, like the camera, people will pay just to have different colored rings around the lens.
Phone cases are one obvious example of all this, but being able to replace the materials of different parts of the phone seems like the next step.
I'm not convinced this project has much use otherwise, though. Would love to be wrong. But even their demo video shows nothing useful at all.
Another benefit is being able to repair your phone by swapping out a broken module rather than replacing the whole thing. This should reduce waste. Also, you don't need to get new phones every two years, you can just replace modules as they get outdated.
If done well enough, this could shift phones out of excessive consumerism, where buying a new phone is often cheaper than replacing an old one (or where repairing a phone is impossible).
Alternately, you can replace each and every component immediately as soon as a minor upgrade is available! 0.5 more megapixels! Another 200 MHz on that Snapdragon! 5 GB RAM! The same battery pack, but this one has gold stripes and is clearly higher end!
This point especially. New trends will come along in short time which will move the crowd constantly toward purchasing this flashy thing or that.
Just imagine celebrities and pop culture capitalizing on this product.
E.g. Same battery each model... But Model A has the battery plus a sticker of Celebrity A on it. 2 years later, Celebrity A isn't all the rage anymore. Celebrity B is where it's at. Well I guess everyone has to throw out their Model A battery since otherwise they'd be considered lame.
Having modules be external to the device will only add to the crave. For example, I don't replace my RAM in my desktop because this model looks cooler than that model. I replace it based on performance. These phone modules, though, also serve an aesthetic purpose that must be sated.
I have a 4s, skipped 5s, thought about 6 or 6s, now I am going to wait for the 7. I just got the new 9.7 inch apple pro tablet and I don't notice it being all that much faster browsing the web.
I imagine that there's a pretty interesting collection of niche markets for a capable, connected mobile device with interchangeable sensors.
Every piece they make modular adds cost - cost of connectors, weight of the frame to support them, cost of support when the connectors fail.
You can go on about "waste" all you want, but the lowest cost, lowest material devices are rated for single-insertion connections along with components both stacked and heavily integrated.
The reason they could not do displays, RAM, etc is that these components are tightly integrated to the SOC selected, and change regularly. This was true when they announced, even more true now.
Truly Google is the new Microsoft if they devote such time to obvious executive vanity projects, untouched by the taint of reality.
And this kind of device, while it may not be interesting for many consumers, will be very interested for industrial, enterprise, or medical users.
To put it another way, if you were running a medical devices company with limited resources, would you bet on this or bluetooth?
I'm hoping that project Ara will become the perfect test bed for sensor module development. Useful after the initial validation stage of experimental stuff on a breadboard but before the stage where you have established enough customers that you can afford to develop a completely integrated and standalone IOT device.
Then they'll be leaving room for a newcomer to do it.
There is a crossover point wherein overhead reduction is "good enough" and when other factors about the phones begin to dominate.
The iPhone doesn't sell because of a non-removable battery, and the huge number of users who use bulky cases to protect fragile phones, and add-on battery cases, which increase weight and spoil the industrial design, tend to support the case that some people are willing to trade off thinness, weight, or cost for other capabilities.
I don't even think this is controversial. If you look at the number of users asking for microSD whenever a device removes it, or the people wanting additional clip-on lenses, there's a hunger to extend the phone platform.
Now, whether that happens over an integrated UniPro bus, an external lighting cable + case, or bluetooth, is an implementation detail of convenience, ergonomics, and bulk. I personally would rather have upgradeable camera modules or additional battery slots than "Morphie" cases and weird protruding clip ons that weren't designed to work with the builtin optics.
edit: It's not even accurate to describe them as separate computers, because parts have travelled between them more than once.
Taken from their developer page (https://atap.google.com/ara/):
More Space. New Ideas. The Ara frame contains the CPU, GPU, antennas, sensors, battery and display, freeing up more room for hardware in each module. We are looking to module makers to create technology never before seen on smartphones.
With 3D printers, cheaper cheapsets, ..., tinkerers can go on and try to create their own module which they can integrate into their phone. If the module is popular amongst users, integrate it either as a standard module in the ARA store (a 3rd party could for example propose to manufacture that module, shifting those costs to them, Google would just deliver the core ARA product).
I don't often wish for mandatory bundling, but I hope that's what this is about: http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/14/google-now-lets-you-design-...
edit: On second thought, this may end up just being the foundation of Android-based camera backs. Should be a bit of help for camera makers, so that they can focus on the camera module.
Why would camera makers want to give up on the pattern of tying a new firmware feature to a minor case facelift to celebrate it as a new camera generation? Cameras are a market where a few compulsive update-buyers seem to greatly outweigh the masses of thrice-in-a-lifetime buyers in terms of number of devices sold.
As a mobile device, it should be heavier, bigger, and less rugged than an integrated unit, so that may not be a win.
I really hope it works out. (I expect that if it does, then over time everything will be swappable.)
More likely that this will become a standard compute/networking interface into a bunch of specialized modules (stereoscopic cameras, home automation, industrial control, etc.)