The smartphone industry is currently dominated by three companies, Apple, Samsung and Google, who mostly rely on you, the buyer, updating your phone every two years for their revenue. But what if you didn’t have to upgrade your phone every couple of years to get the latest and greatest hardware specs? That’s what Google’s ambitious Project Ara wants to do. The team of people at Google working on Project Ara, earlier a part of Motorola, are designing a smartphone that is made up of independent, replaceable modules, or blocks, that can be singly upgraded without having to purchase an entirely new device. Making each component of the phone independent presents a lot of challenges. The iPhone and other Android phones contain components that are tightly integrated, for various reasons like making the device as compact as possible, ensuring communication between them is fast etc. Project Ara will obviously lose out on these benefits, but Google hopes that the pros of being able to easily update to the latest-generation hardware outweigh these cons. Google designed Android with customisation in mind, giving manufacturing partners as well as users the freedom to change and customise almost every aspect of the OS, so isn’t surprising that the company wants to bring the same level of freedom to hardware too. When Project Ara was first conceptualised in this video, it seemed pretty far-fetched. But Google already has a working prototype, and is targeting a next year public release. Customisation and choice sound great in theory, but do you think practically, Project Ara smartphones will appeal to the average buyer? Let us know in the comments. [via The Verge] Continue reading
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