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Comment by galenko | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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