People keep saying this won't work and that modular HW was really only good for games, but there's lots of examples of modularity already in consumer space:
1) Many mobile phones are already modular to an extent. Replaceable batteries, replaceable SD cards, replaceable SIM cards. Then there's an entire ecosystem of add-on cases for phones. Sony is shipping add-on camera lens even.
Ara is just proposing to make some additional things "add-on", like swapping the camera module. If they only made battery and camera the swappable modules alone, it would be a big win, and plenty of people would choose different camera modules.
2) Look at the prosumer camera market, both DSLR and new mirror-less models. A significant population of people desire interchangeable lens. A phone with interchangeable camera module could have all kinds of possibilities.
At a certain point, phones will be so powerful and capable that losing 15% of size/weight efficiency to achieve flexibility, especially as devices become commoditized will be a tradeoff worth making.
> Many mobile phones are already modular to an extent. Replaceable batteries, replaceable SD cards, replaceable SIM cards.
I'm not sure those are great examples of modularity on the march; replaceable batteries and replaceable SD cards, at least, are both much less common on smartphones today than they were (say) five years ago. The trend for the last couple of years has been towards non-user-serviceable batteries and omitting external storage slots altogether.
(I wish it wasn't, since I want my phone to have those features, but that's the way the market has been going.)
The idea I have heard most is that is happening because Google is pushing it for people to use their "cloud" services. You don't need a lot of space for music, use my cloud music streaming service. Don't store your documents in your device, use Google docs. Out of memory in Drive? You should upgrade your plan. And so on.
As a person that likes to carry an awful lot of music allways, it sucks a lot and really limits your choices when buying a new phone.
> losing 15% of size/weight efficiency to achieve flexibility
It's funny because our phones have already become more than 15% bigger than they were a few years ago, and people were saying then that phones couldn't get any bigger.
There are definitely people who don't like large phones, but the sales of the Samsung line alone (not to mention recent entrants to the "phablet" market like Apple) prove that our earlier assumptions about device size were wrong.
I definitely would appreciate having a slightly larger phone in exchange for some of the modularity you describe.
Absolutely. I had the first Droid X, and when I got it, folks were always asking "does it even fit in your pocket?" These days that 4" screen wouldn't stand out at all. It's the same way now with my Note 3. We get used to larger phones, in spite of the inconvenience, because of the other features they have that we want.
"Look at the prosumer camera market, both DSLR and new mirror-less models. A significant population of people desire interchangeable lens. A phone with interchangeable camera module could have all kinds of possibilities."
If you told me I could have a large, high-quality sensor (wouldn't even need full-frame necessarily), and a single fast lens that covered a wide range of focal lengths with excellent sharpness, chromatic aberration, bokeh, etc, I and many other passionate photographers would buy it in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, the reality is that prime lenses, due to fewer components and lens elements, tend to have better specs than zoom lenses. The super-zooms you see on the market with insane focal ranges (like 18-250) are typically very slow (f/4.5 or so), very heavy, and if you look at comparisons their quality is crap.
So I think I would rewrite your comment to read "a significant population of people desire high-performance capabilities, and currently the only way to get on the higher-end of that spectrum is via interchangeable lenses."
Interchangeable lens attachments for phones have been attempted and have not done too well because ultimately they just don't perform as well[1]. Also, if you are bothering to carry around a separate lens attachment for a mobile device, you are probably in a situation where you could carry a mirrorless camera as well. I know if I had the choice between carrying some lenses and a slightly heavier Sony A7 vs. lenses and a phone, it would be the A7 all the way.
>and that modular HW was really only good for games
Yes modular hardware is great for games, and for computing components in general. The highly specialized component manufacturers that popped up around the IBM ATX/mATX/ITX/mITX PC form factors allowed for the multi-billion per year Graphics Card, Hard Drive, Ram, etc. and for each to compete internally.
This internal competition over real estate within a computer has driven a lot of hardware innovation. And with servers also conforming to these standardized form factors, we now see almost everything running on x86_64 ATX form factor components.
I'm not a hardware guy, so this may be naive, but I wish there were an ATX-type standard for phone-sized embedded devices. A Raspberry Pi is about the size of a phone. MiniITX is old and too big.
The Pi doesn't have wireless -- you have to add that with USB. And then they have this add-on camera module, and a compute board too. Lots of people appear to be adding hi-fi amps and DACs as well to the Pi.
It doesn't feel like USB is really the right solution. With USB, you run into some mechanical problems like flash thumb drives being too wide and blocking more than one port.
I feel like an ATX-type standard would be appropriate to address this problem, and let other manufacturers specialize and compete with different SOCs and peripherals for embedded devices. It seems like some of the expertise from Project Ara would transfer over to this. But I don't know that there's any economic incentive to work on it. Intel or IBM would may be a better steward of such a project.
Mechanical problems with USB thumb drives are not caused by USB itself but by manufacturers that ignore mechanical specification of USB connector and it's surrounding space. On the other hand, there are many protocol-level reasons why USB is not good interface for essentially any kind of device, especially when you take cellphone-style power management into account.
Well, if the Ara ecosystem takes off, it could lead us in that direction.
A modular system to build any computing device you need. Remove the battery and put it on mains power. Replace the GSM radio module with ethernet. Install an ssh server, then pop off the screen. Who ever said you had to build a phone?
1) Many mobile phones are already modular to an extent. Replaceable batteries, replaceable SD cards, replaceable SIM cards. Then there's an entire ecosystem of add-on cases for phones. Sony is shipping add-on camera lens even.
Ara is just proposing to make some additional things "add-on", like swapping the camera module. If they only made battery and camera the swappable modules alone, it would be a big win, and plenty of people would choose different camera modules.
2) Look at the prosumer camera market, both DSLR and new mirror-less models. A significant population of people desire interchangeable lens. A phone with interchangeable camera module could have all kinds of possibilities.
At a certain point, phones will be so powerful and capable that losing 15% of size/weight efficiency to achieve flexibility, especially as devices become commoditized will be a tradeoff worth making.