Goodbye Sticky. Hello Ara | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye Sticky. Hello Ara

motorola-blog.blogspot.com

237 pointsmikeevans79 comments

As someone with similar interests in a large Finnish company...

God help the antenna engineers assigned to this project.

Whether the antenna is part of the "endo" (and thus subject to interference from potentially unknown external modules) or àn external component itself (and thus subject to interference from potentially unknown adjacent modules) it's going to be an unholy nightmare to try and engineer.

That said, I would love if they could figure some sort of genius solution to the problem and further this concept. Wild things like this are exactly what Motorola should be doing (along with continuing to iterate on the solid Moto X)

At the risk of sounding like a complete idiot: can't they send on slightly different frequencies or wavelengths? Or: why don't they just copy the design of antennas in mobile phones?

What's different technically from mobile phones?

Antennas on mobile phones need to be designed to take into account the environment around them - other chips, other antennas, metal body of case work, likely position of head relative to phone. They are customised to the particular application.

Trying to design one that will work regardless of the combination of other components chosen is a difficult challenge.

Sort of. Mass market radios are designed for low cost and low power consumption, and the engineering cost is amortized over tens of millions of devices. For that market segment it makes sense to make a perfectly customized radio.

There's nothing to stop them from putting a self-tuning phased-array radio on a niche product. At $50 a unit extra on a volume of 200,000 it might be viable. And the tech could be amortized over a line of industrial radios too.

Wouldn't it be possible to design a self-optimizing antenna, perhaps with MEMS switches, that randomly tries different configurations to maximize signal strength?

As someone with interests in a company that tests solutions for these kinds of problems... bring them on :D

It would also be an interesting dance to get something like this through CTIA/Carrier certification. Having gone through the early PTCRB certification stages of a module integration (integrated a pre-certified GSM module into an enclosed circuit), I remember vividly the expense, and the fact that any internal hardware changes require recertification. Something like this blurs the lines between "external" and "internal." Here's hoping the CTIA and friends will adapt.

What if the antenna were built into the frame onto which all the modules mount?

I remember the thread about phoneblocks and how it was never going to happen, who would have known that Motorolla was working on something similar for almost a year at the time.

Hope Dave gets something out of it, besides the warm and fuzzy feeling that Motorolla makes a product that is similar to his idea.

Or Motorola saw phoneblocks and threw together a couple of copycat renders in order to get back into the limelight?

> I remember the thread about phoneblocks and how it was never going to happen

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373237

Wow, my thoughts exactly. I thought "huh, kind of neat concept, but seems a bit impractical, don't think anyone will actually be able to manufacture the hardware efficiently."

Now, it's still vaporware, but Motorola's backing is a big step towards something that could actually happen.

From the post, FWIW:

> Recently, we met Dave Hakkens, the creator of Phonebloks. Turns out we share a common vision: to develop a phone platform that is modular, open, customizable, and made for the entire world. We’ve done deep technical work. Dave created a community. The power of open requires both. So we will be working on Project Ara in the open, engaging with the Phonebloks community throughout our development process, as well as asking questions to our Project Ara research scouts (volunteers interested in helping us learn about how people make choices).

I saw that, but it doesn't really mean he's getting anything from it besides "Motorolla's staff are gonna be active on his forums".

I just hope Dave at least gets a job out of this.

They wouldn't be taking his community for nothing. I'm sure he's getting something from it.

Have they shown a working prototype yet? For all we know, that's the last we may hear of the project. Sadly, it's happened that way for many promising products (Microsoft Courier, anyone?)

Google are trigger happy with killing products but I am not aware of many announced and undelivered ones. But I don't follow them too much.

Courier was a pitchdeck in video form. It was never a real product.

Has Phonebloks done anything besides draw concept images though? I mean, it's a cool idea but something like this is far easier to dream up than to implement. Was the point just to show manufacturers that people would buy something like Phonebloks? I would like to buy a flying car too, but that doesn't mean starting an internet campaign is going to make that any more likely.

There's a huge difference between Motorola working on something for a year and a person / small team with a concept asking for donations.

While the Phonebloks concept got a lot of hype, I haven't seen any mention of Modu, an Israel based phone manufacturer (startup). They introduced the first modular phone but it wasn't never a success and the company went bankrupt in 2011. Interestingly enough, Google bought their patents and now we have a modular phone concept from Google owned Motorola.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modu

Thank you! I was thinking about the same thing during the hype and could not remember the name of the company.

Reminds me of the quote [1]: "There's very little difference between being early and being wrong."

Sometimes, you have the right idea, but the world isn't ready for it, yet. Appears to be the case for Modu?

edit: found quote reference. [1] Herb Greenberg, 27 Apr 1986, Chicago Tribune. <http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-04-27/business/86013...

That's a good find, but when I think about that quote with technology adoption, I remember Joe Kraus's great "Confessions of a Startup Addict" from Startup School, where he said "Being early feels the same as being wrong -- you're dead!"

http://www.brendonwilson.com/blog/2006/04/30/joe-kraus-confe...

Probably my favorite startup speech, but no longer online anywhere due to lossage from Omnisio and the YC Infogami.

Case in point: A whole generation of tablets were born and died around '99-2003 (I worked on one through '99). In retrospect it is easy to see why they were too early, but working on one it was easy to be seduced by the idea and not see how badly the limitations imposed by the technology available compromised the end-result.

It looks pretty on paper, but it can't ever compete with a properly designed and executed product in the real world. The reason Apple can get their devices so small is the complete omission of connectors and other internal padding. This thing (whatever it is) will just be a mess of connectors and other supporting hardware- a monolith of extendability that will never be used by an end user. Any extendability it has will be stunted by the bus abatable to it; you won't get an external screen or upgraded processor on a flimsy usb-alike connector.

I would wager that almost every "reconfigurable" device or product just ends up in a single setting, which would have been better off being found during product testing and the rest of the configurations ignored.

> it can't ever compete with a properly designed and executed product in the real world

Apple isn't going to create a GPS tracking module for a truck. The goal of Ara is to provide small factor computer platform for new applications.

> This thing (whatever it is) will just be a mess of connectors and other supporting hardware- a monolith of extendability that will never be used by an end user.

Yes, it probably would be a mess compared to an iPhone - just like the PC vs Mac.

I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss this, you might be surprised how many users would prefer the ability to customize their devices over one-size-fits-all solutions.

Just ask yourself why there are so many people buying all those high end Android devices.

They aren't all buying android to run a nightly build of x. People are buying them because the screen is so big, it looks nice , my mum bought the same one , the salesman said this was the best phone. Tech sites overestimate how many people want to mess with the innards of anything.

That's the thought process for purchasing a phone. Think about purchasing a general purpose computer. Think about replacing your game console.

Motorola may have been a phone company, but this thing isn't a phone by any stretch of the imagination. A true convergence technology could stand to support a little modularity.

"Just ask yourself why there are so many people buying all those high end Android devices."

Over here (Uruguay), it's the network effect, and Android being cheaper (both perceived and in app availability).

Apple makes no efforts to cater to some particulars of Third World countries (like, no credit card even having enough income, and a strong dislike to tying it to anything). I wonder how they manage to be apparently strong in China. Android dominates in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East

App availability is much better for Android here.

Microsoft made many of Apple's screw-ups as well.

So, if you plan to buy a high end phone in Uruguay, 97% will end up buying an Android (and most of those will end up with a Samsung Galaxy, which is what the official carrier pushes).

Apple does have a lot of signalling value though :) and and iPhone is perceived as a luxury product too, but it's way more impractical here.

Hi -

Really appreciate your comment. My startup, Nulu, is servicing Latin America with an English learning product with daily news content. Something you mentioned is that Apple makes no effort to cater to those who have no credit cards. Can you tell me a little more about how you and others would prefer to purchase devices and apps? How about products and services over the web?

I'm really quite interested as we're facing the same challenges you're speaking about.

Hi, I don't think there's a Latin-America wide answer to that unfortunately.

Here in Uruguay, the most popular method for payments is through a nationwide payments network, the two biggest being Abitab and RedPagos:

"Abitab and Red Pagos, channel some 49% transactions of the retail payment system, with credit cards (39%) and cheques (9%)"

https://twitter.com/marslombas/status/302521188939358209

The local Groupon clone, wOOw (www.woow.com.uy , which vastly outperforms Groupon here) uses mainly Abitab, as well as credit cards, with the important distinction of accepting locally issued credit cards which do not exist outside of Uruguay or Argentina.

In Argentina there exist similar payment networks (RapiPago and PagoFacil I think)

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapipago

I'm not sure what the situation is in Brazil or Chile (I think they have ServiPag) or the rest of the Latin American countries.

There must be services to integrate with those payment methods easily, here in Uruguay we have CobrosYa

https://www.cobrosya.com/sitio/

It seems very primitive and it introduces a huge friction, especially for impulse purchases like apps.

Apple buyers here in Uruguay are usually wealthy and do have credit cards. The problem is Android users (the vast majority), which don't have a culture of paying for apps (and most have the attitude of just looking for the free equivalent).

I investigated starting a micropayments platform based on the cell phone, but I gave up due to the extreme complexity involved, but there's certainly a lot of opportunities to disrupt - and some are doing it like former coworkers who started Paganza:

http://www.paganza.com

Thank you so much - super useful information. It matches a lot of what we've discovered over the past several years looking into the market. If you don't mind my asking, what are the most effective ways of communicating "how to pay" to consumers in Uruguay? Any sites that you've seen that do a particularly good job?

You said it yourself: android is perceived as cheaper. The new middle class in China are practicing conspicuous consumption, and one of the ways they do that is by preferring luxury imports like louis Vuitton and apple.

Agreed. To me at least, the iPhones are beautiful, fast, reliable...and really, frickin boring. I would much rather have an fat, ugly phone if that meant I could customize it.

True, but at some point in the not too distant future, electronics will have shrunk so much, that this shouldn't matter any more. Phones can only become so small before they become unusable. So development is on their side.

It's not going to beat "dedicated smartphone"; think "hardware for low-volume product" or "add a nice touch UI to an existing product".

The Android trend is for larger devices, while the electronics keeps shrinking. The last generation PCB for my last 7" tablet would easily fit into my current 4.3" phone.

> you won't get an external screen or upgraded processor on a flimsy usb-alike connector.

Current screens are already connected by flimsy connectors. Have you tried changing screen on a phone in recent years?

I just noticed http://www.dscout.com/ara

Maybe I'm paranoid, but it seems more a way for motorolla to leverage a community on the cheap.

I really doubt the ARA will exist in a way that makes it really usable. IMO it seems like the technology is moving faster in a direction where you can produce a cheap small batch of custom build hardware (or an infinite variety of models like Samsung) rather than going back in the old school lego model.

However, I can see the scout data from the community being incredibly useful for a company to create devices dedicated to various markets.

Let me give you an alternate use case beyond the upgrade-ability. I see the advantages of this more-so in day to day use. I use my phone in several different environments and to that end right now I have multiple phones because of the limitations.

Typical days I want a full featured general use device... well rounded. I carry my Nexus 4.

My job requires me to spend several days a month "on-site" where I will be on my feet moving for 12-14 hours a day. I need battery life as I can't stop at a charger. I carry my Nexus One (yes, it still goes a 12 hour day under solid use)

Lastly, when I travel I'd like to have a phone with a better camera so I wouldn't have to carry one. The Nexus 4 is good but if there was a better option I'd take it.

I would like to see a device like this give me the option to reconfigure on the fly. When I'm on-site I'll pop in 2 battery modules... when I travel I'll put in the better (yet maybe bulkier) camera... day to day I'll use a more general set of components. Through it all I don't have to sync data or worry about what is on each device. Additionally this would easily allow swappable batteries (and if they permit more than one... hot swappable)

I don't think they have the design nailed yet... but I also don't think this is something that should be discounted at all. Those who research this early despite the nay-sayers are the ones who just might be holding the next great thing in the end.

Two questions: 1. why not just carry a battery case for your Nexus 4? 2. keep in mind that modular = bigger. Would you still like to carry the phone if it meant that in Nexus 4 configuration it would be 2 times bigger and weight two times as much as your regular Nexus 4?

Phones are too cheap -- and getting cheaper. And I suspect most people find just simply selecting a fully-baked phone intimidating enough.

The actual market for this kind of device would be tiny. (Why I suspect this won't even make it to market.)

This is just Motorola brand marketing.

Now finally, I can build a coffee brewer attachment. http://pomegranatephone.com/

I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about how technically feasible this actually is (under a single discussion thread).

[1] Sirkneeland states that it's going to be tough to engineer the antenna

[2] nwh states that "Any extendability it has will be stunted by the bus abatable to it; you won't get an external screen or upgraded processor on a flimsy usb-alike connector"

Any other thoughts?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632641 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632597

I love the concept, but I can't see how you're going to avoid losing out majorly on size and/or battery life.

As I understand it, one of the major size reduction wins in the modern mobile phone is packaging - taking the major components and packing them in such a way as to lose as little space as possible. The battery shape can be designed to go with whatever packaging is chosen.

In this scenario, the packaging decisions are already made - or rather, there isn't much flexibility. Each device has to be a cuboid, placed next to each other. The same is true of the battery. The packaging of the blocks is going to cost you some space (connectors, case), but you're also going to waste space in a block as it's unlikely the given chip is going to be exactly as big as the package. The same is true of the battery - rather than fitting in a customised space, it's another cuboid.

All of these little inefficiencies of space will add up, so that either you've got a very big phone, or one with a very small battery.

In terms of the bus, I don't think that's a problem. You're right, no one bus technology is going to work for everything, but a couple of different ones might, between them, work for everything.

I don't get why anyone would want a modular phone. It's so backwards from where we are heading. Promise you a non-modular phone will be smaller, lighter, etc. The slight variations in how people customize a phone... guarantee they'd be happier finding a phone they liked and buying it. Plus... phones aren't expensive, why not just throw them out ever 18 months?

I find myself increasingly reading these kind of opinions

>Why would we want X? It's completely useless considering Y.

What's wrong with this? When did the idea of making a cool concept like modular phones accessible to the average consumer become a something negative?

I remember loving to build computers, I don't anymore because I've dropped desktop altogether in favor of portable solutions and a Pi. That however does not mean I wouldn't want to see and support a technology that ultimately would boost portable computing innovation.

I believe many of you simply do not see the potential in this! The whole idea might flop, but if it doesn't, it opens up a lot of possibilities. An Apple iPhone lets you play with software within a very strict sandbox, and Android only offers a slightly larger sandbox. The devices have in common that they are so versatile in their usefulness, and this brought them success; they greatly outperform the older generations. This idea is one idea that might prove another leap in versatility and usefulness, and if it does, it'll disrupt.

Do you have any idea how stupid you sound?

> phones aren't expensive

A new smartphone in the US is $600-800 off contract.

In my own experience: that puts it in line with (A) my car which I purchased and titled for $500 last year, and (B) my workstation which cost $1200 without peripherals.

Both my car and workstation are, unsurprisingly, modular systems that can be useful for years or even decades with proper care.

My retired work-station is still in use as a file-server, and that machine is 8 years old. My car is 300,000 miles young without a single major mechanical fault.

---

So from where I'm standing: $600 is a rather sizable chunk of change that I'd much rather spend on a system that's _not designed to be disposable._

I can't even find a current-gen smartphone that I'm remotely interested in purchasing. The "smaller and lighter" you speak is not so much _smaller_ but _thinner._

I don't need, or even desire a 1080p screen on my phone; despite being interested in other current gen components like the latest round of cameras.

You can't make the physical package and smaller than the _gigantic displays_ these phones are being equipped with. I would sooner part with $600 for an iPhone 4S-sized "endo skeleton" with current gen "RAM and CPU modules" and a slightly smaller battery. A tradeoff that's possible when you're dealing with modules... but a financial disaster when you're trying to design a mass-market phone to compete with the Android flagships.

If you've read Clayton Christensen's books, you know that after "integration" comes "disintegration"/modularization when the market becomes mature enough, just like it did in the PC world many years ago.

This might be what disintegration looks like for smartphones. Maybe our devices won't be just black boxes we can't get into in the future.

From Geoffrey Moore's books (Crossing the Chasm, etc) we also know that when a market becomes "mature"/saturated, the companies start to "mass customize" their products. We can already see the beginning of that trend with multiple colors for devices, multiple backs, etc, instead of the previous just black, or black and white.

Notice that this announcement was 10 hours before the phoneblocks "Thunderclap" to 970,000 social media accounts, as well as the speculated Nexus 5 announcement. Interesting timing.

I can't see this working for consumer phones in the short term (though long term we'll get to the Beats Audio stage where the tech is completely commodified and the packaging will become all important).

However, right now it seems ideal as a prototyping platform, or even a way to produce short runs of devices that need (most of) a commodity smartphone plus a couple of random sensors or connectors.

I'm the tech lead at dscout.com, the tool that Motorola is using to run the "Project Ara Research". The design team behind the product it is personally running the research effort, so if you have ideas or comments you may want to check it out.

Any feedback you submit is going to them directly.

[1] http://dscout.com/ara

This seems like mostly PR.

Now if Motorola could give us a good usable mesh router for the masses, that would be something with actual impact.

That seems to be what a lot of Google initiatives are lately. It's like Xerox PARC or Microsoft Research, except Google is taking the step to capitalize on those projects for PR reasons as well. I doubt they will have more success in getting things to market and making a business out of something from their research labs than Microsoft (so that it shifts the revenue mix from 94% ads to anything else). It's important for them to be seen as "innovative" so that the company doesn't become a stodgy old web company like AOL or Yahoo. I believe mainly for recruitment purposes.

In a day and age where computers are seeing more soldering and glue than ever I am hard pressed to believe that anything like this would ever see the light of day, production-wise.

It's a neat concept but building a mobile device is more than just schluffing together a bunch of random parts.

This could be a huge win for Motorola. Say they control/patent the shell and the communications interface. It's easy and cheap to build. They charge $99 for it with great margins. All this while module builders compete both for price and features.

Since this is open, the winner in this market will be the company who can build the best ecosystem. Who can do that better than Google?

And it would be almost impossible for Samsung to compete, since they are a highly integrated company.

The interesting reaction would be from apple: they are highly integrated so hard to move to this model but they also know how to build ecosystems.

If Google builds something compelling, I'm grabbing my popcorn.

Come to think of it, both projects look to be inspired by Bug Labs' modules.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_Labs

This interesting thing about what they have in their example is there not all phones need to be 100% modular. that blue phone looks like a normal phone with only one modular point.

Best of both worlds

There are two more on the backside.

yes in fact looking at it that is very modular (it is the one the hand is holding for starters.)

But the point still stands. I (as a manufacturer) could release a phone with huge customizability or maybe just 1 or 2 slots. Quite flexible

As long as the communication / power bus and physical size standards are ruthlessly enforced.

I've actually never seen the idea of a phoneblock but it sounds awesome. I've always wanted a mass spectrometer on my phone (okay maybe that is asking a bit too much).

Not exactly what you're looking for, but a friend of mine sells $10 origami spectrometers that use your phone camera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA5BTD-aelo / http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jywarren/public-lab-diy-....

"how do we bring the benefits of an open hardware ecosystem to 6 billion people?"

What about the remaining billion?

They are happy in the walled garden of Apple :)

They need to get access to clean water before they move on to open hardware ecosystems for modular smartphones.

This design reminds me of The Centurions (http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/c/centurion.htm). Good times.

One missing piece (or at least, not shown, and not sure how it would conflict in their puzzle like approach) is a hardware keyboard. Mostly for that i prefer Jolla's other half idea for modularity.

Well, I'll be dammed.

Did anyone notice the cat with the sunglasses "module"?

Looks like an E-Paper display module perhaps?

It is probably just supposed to be a module (as the one to its left) with some fancy graphics on it. It has the same edges as the (again) module to the left of it.

I wonder what the phoneblock team is thinking right now...

Thankfully Motorola gets in touch with them.

It's worth reading the linked article before commenting on it.

yeah i read it later, forgot deleting the comment

Not being asian and reading a few years ago that the company started calling itself MOTO for the difficult it is to pronounce the full name with asian phonetics, Ara is a kick in the balls and I feel sorry for them choosing that name.

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