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Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works
An anonymous reader writes Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group demonstrated Tango, a tablet with 3D cameras similar to Microsoft's Kinect and a version of the Ara phone that could almost boot to the Android home screen (it froze during the demo) at Google I/O today. Project Ara will give $100,000 to anyone who can create an Ara module that does something current smartphones can't. From the article: "Ara moved from concept render to physical mockup in about six months, and onstage today Google demonstrated a version of the phone that could just about boot to the Android home screen. In the demo above, the phone displayed a partial boot screen before freezing. The full boot time (had the demo worked as intended) would be about a minute, which would be a long time for a shipping phone but is reasonably impressive for such an early prototype. Software is the other thing that Ara's developers need to figure out. Current Android builds ship with support for the hardware the phone runs, but they don't include a whole bunch of extraneous drivers for other modems or Wi-Fi modules or cameras or SoCs. Current phone hardware doesn't change, so Android doesn't typically need to worry about this kind of thing."
Well I've never seen any phone with a built in grappling hook before...
about sex toys, and then I will see child posts with links that made me wish I never did.
and Tango.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Now, from the people who brought you PCMCIA cards... Remember when you could slot an Ethernet interface or a modem into a PCMCIA slot? Same idea.
Phones should be going in the other direction. No connectors at all. A phone today has about four or five radios in it; do any data transfer over WiFi or Bluetooth or the cellular link. Charging should be inductive, which will happen when one of the three competing wireless charging systems wins. Phones should be waterproof, shockproof, dust-resistant, and close to indestructable.
... automatically when out of reach of a base station.
There's prob. an app for that -- I need to look.
Okay, how 'bout this for project Ara: a module that
will learn to parrot me, that can fake me going about town
and carry the phone, leave a fake triangulation trace, fake
usage, mail, web, settings twiddling -- the works, everything
indistinguishable from the real live thing.
There should be a market for this.
"In the demo above, the phone displayed a partial boot screen before freezing."
"Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works"
Maybe it's just me, but if a phone can't even get to the dialer to make a phone call, that's a little further from "actually working" than "almost."
I mean that seriously. My problem isn't with the phone itself. My problem is with the overly generous summary.
Call me a troll, but if any company other than Google unveiled this phone, and it didn't even boot during the demo, I don't think the reaction would be as positive.
Yeah it's modular and a few years from now they'll upgrade the bus or tweak the dimensions or bump the battery requirements and now that modular phone is as obsolete as all the rest. Or worse, future modules are gimped to conform to the old standard and include circuitry to step down in some way. Either way users get a device which costs more and doesn't deliver something tangibly better.
What do you mean I have a conflict on an IRQ????
I plugs in this video card and it works. I plugs in this video card and it doesn't.
I think the concept is cool and as the pathways between modules gets faster, it will be great. But I'll wait for a few more releases before I try it. Unless someone gives me one for super cheap.
Virus?
But it's still (almost) true. Of course such phones *can* be built, it's just a matter of money and time tossed on it. Problem is somewhere else - how do you plan to make such phones competitive at all. How do you want to provide high performance? Battery time? Low latencies? Low price? Size that will still fit in the pocket?
Mobile devices are evolving to be more integrated, not less. Modularity requires you to give up any integration - which makes things like high performance or long battery time hard to achieve. What's important - you cannot even simply sacrifice one of it, as odds are that it won't help much with others anyway - unless you sacrifice modularity of course.
Ara is just a R&D project. Maybe it will bring some useful knowledge that will be later integrated into real devices - but I don't think it will bring the oh-my-god-so-modular phone to the market. I'm more excited about projects like Neo900 - this is how "modularity" in mobile devices should be achieved. Plus the solution with two PCBs gives hope for even more "modularity" in future, with potential partial updates.
Exactly. That's why a modular PCs were never created. There's no way you can get high performance when the user can pick their own RAM, CPU, motherboard, video card, hard drives, etc.
Oh, wait.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's called Autoconfig. Essentially, Autoconfig does IRQ and address assignment (And is so good at it that Intel copied it for their "Plug'n'Play" system), but Autoconfig does more than that. It also initializes the firmware and loads it in. And the firmware for each device then contains the necessary libraries to (at the very least) get the hardware running. So, for example, hard-drive controllers get their drivers loaded and the hard-drive becomes available as a boot device, network cards are initialized enough that PXE booting works, graphics cards are started up and displays initialized, sound cards are initialized, etc.
So, essentially, every piece of hardware would take care of it's own drivers and NVRam config. WiFi module has WiFi drivers on it. And so on. The configuration software was not included on-device, but there's next-to-no reason why that couldn't be on-device too, as the price of flash is extremely cheap these days.
It's totally possible to build them. They're just going to be twice as thick and 50% heavier than an all-in-one device, so a few weirdos who post on Slashdot will buy them so they can feel smug about how modular their phones are, while everyone else will keep on buying the thinnest, lightest (or cheapest) phones they can find.
How about something that can read an IR sensor such that:
1. approach woman at bar, place phone on bar next to drink
2. phone takes baseline body temps of said woman
3. chat with woman for 5 minutes
4. phone takes update body temps to see where the blood is flowing
5. pick up phone and get 1 to 10 scale on how "excited" the woman was with me
could work on men too just have to look for different "hot spots"
Exactly! And we consistently see that in the tiny laptops with long battery lives.
Oh, wait.
Exactly. That's why a modular PCs were never created. There's no way you can get high performance when the user can pick their own RAM, CPU, motherboard, video card, hard drives, etc.
Oh, wait.
Size matters. Desktop PCs are easy to make modular (unless you want an iMac). Laptops are harder, and besides removable batteries, only a few had any modular components (like a DVD drive swappable for an extra battery). Phones are much more space-constrained. Every millimeter counts, and modularity takes up quite a bit of space at that scale, because each part needs to be enclosed, securely attach to the others, etc.
In short, a modular phone is possible, but the trade-offs will be severe, and you'll be able to pick one or two things (e.g. speed, battery life, extra features, small size, etc.) but not all at the same time. And the prices won't be good, because manufacturer(s) will lose economies of scale: it'll be hard to compete with Apple and Samsung making millions and tens of millions of identical units.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Actually 30% bigger, not 100%.
One for the business, or for each business, one for the kids, one for the wife, and one for the mistress.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Come back to me when a PC has to fit in a pocket and run off a small battery for a day.
Oh, wait.
Great. I'll probably have nightmares tonight about it malfunctioning in my pocket.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
maybe ok for baseline drivers.
But what if I plug in a three year old module to my new phone.
It wants to load old drivers incompatible with current OS revision.
Better to load a device ID of some sort and let the phone go get the proper drivers from a signed website
Ouch
Replacement is easy, upgrades are a PITA.
I can tell you from first hand experience, pun intended, than MANY current phones work just fine as hand warmers.
Yeah. And not only that, who decides where to cut the boundaries?
The OP talks abouta PC having RAM, CPU, Motherboard, Video Card. If we take Motherboard as a combination of chipset and backplane, then I can list at least several chips that have either just the CPU, or CPU and chipset, or CPU, chipset and video, or CPU, chipset, video and RAM. So where are the lines drawn? Least common denominator is clearly also least efficient. Guess what the smallest PCs use?
For phones this whole idea is stupidly naive, and I can't believe how much media coverage (and apparent internal funding) it has gotten. Calling it a moonshot is even more ridiculous. It's not even innovation; it's masturbation. If you really want to help the planet, do your homework.
Please provide some real-world scenarios how this is actually going to pan out; right now most of the technologies are pretty well matched and/or making them swappable would have big impacts on size (and additional plastic?).
News flash: connectors are expensive, error prone and bulky.
For example:
- swap the display: higher resolution would probably mean that you would also need a different graphics driver, which, guess what, is integrated with the CPU and a bunch of other shit in one chip.
- increase RAM: RAM is incredibly small and tightly integrated onto the board (for example _below_ another chip), so that a removable module would substantially increase the space requirements. Especially if you take into account the tight timing/buffering requirements.
- increase Flash: just get a phone with MicroSD support...
- Swap for higher resolution camera: this is maybe the only thing that I think holds some merit. Makes you wonder, why haven't LG, HTC, Samsung etc made the camera modular? (hint: because by the time a better camera comes out, you'll also want a better CPU/display/etc)
- Get better battery: have you looked at the rate at which battery tech is improving? Btw, most Samsung phones already have replacable batteries...
Our phones today are incredible marvels of miniaturization. I'm sorry, but it's really irritating to see some people who have NO FUCKING IDEA how to build these type of electronics think that they have a moonshot project.
Here's an idea for Google: why not write an OS so that you can easily swap out your entire phone when you need different functionality? Need more RAM just exchange it and let someone else use your previous phone that still works fine. The fact that we have to "migrate" from one Android phone to another is ridiculous.
I've actually done 2 of the 3 of those on laptops, to replace broken parts. They're fairly modular under the hood. For proof look at the 2 in 1 tablets- basically a snap on keyboard to a tablet. Laptops could easily have been done that way. They just never made them easier to remove because the manufacturers thought they could make more money by not allowing resuse and 3rd party parts. And of course all the internals have always been modular, that's why you can customize them at dell and hp's websites.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Exactly. Replacement can be even done in current mobile phones, that's not a big issue.
With enough skill you can replace broken parts in "non-modular" mobile phones as well. That's not the problem.
Try to upgrade CPU on your laptop, let's say from Sandy Bridge to Haswell. Then we can talk.
Where would it store the cable behind the hook?
I've replaced hard drives, RAM, WiFi, keyboards, power supplies, video cards, batteries and more in many normal laptops.
True, laptops allow RAM and hard drive upgrades and replacing dead keyboards and batteries. But a lot of laptops have video or WLAN circuitry soldered to the motherboard. A lot of others use only a video card or WLAN card whitelisted by the laptop's manufacturer so that the laptop keeps its FCC and HDCP certification.
Of course, the market for "tiny laptops with long battery lives" is so niche
So niche that even Walmart is selling Chromebooks, and Microsoft has had manufacturers bring back the 10" Windows laptop for its Scroogled campaign. So the discontinuation of netbooks lasted only from the beginning to the end of 2013.
Even a netbook can be expanded with a USB ethernet or modem or camera or more hard drive space or 1000s of other things you can throw in your bag and take with you.
I know. I carry a 10" laptop because there are plenty of things I do while riding the bus that I can't do on a smartphone or iPad. But one big advantage that a 10" laptop has over a smartphone is it's not quite as battery-constrained. In order to hook all these USB peripherals up to a tablet, someone might have to invent a battery-powered hub.
I know this type of phone is not for you, that is fine. I can get almost the phone I want and I'm happy to pay to get one closer.
But once a modular cell phone does come out, how long will it remain available until there aren't enough people buying it to keep it in production? For a while, manufacturers gave up on 10" laptops throughout 2013 until Microsoft wanted something to fight the Chromebook with in its Scroogled campaign.
Here's an idea for Google: why not write an OS so that you can easily swap out your entire phone when you need different functionality?
In theory, you can put a new Google account on your old phone and Google Play Store will make your old applications available so that you can download it and restore your online backups. But in practice, there are a lot of things not under control of online backup because fitting online backup with everything else you use on a 1 GB per month data plan isn't very fun.
No we really don't. Infecting another device from standard contact is pretty much exactly what we call a virus. This is like auto-running USB sticks on Windows XP.
I don't know how big your pockets are but I've always had trouble fitting laptops in them. Maybe they're fit if they were "tiny"? Like cellphone sized maybe?
It's totally possible to build them. They're just going to be twice as thick and 50% heavier than an all-in-one device, so a few weirdos who post on Slashdot will buy them so they can feel smug about how modular their phones are, while everyone else will keep on buying the thinnest, lightest (or cheapest) phones they can find.
Here's the Raspberry pi cellphone. It works.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/...
It works, but the concept of these modular devices, which only replace something that is already much better implemented is silly, other than the guy making it having fun doing just that. Maybe make a steampunk brass case for it. But not for 99.9999999 percent of the market.
My guess is that the market for modular cellphones will be somewhat less than for the Pi's or Beaglebones. Gramma probably doesn't want one. That is not Google's business plan last time I looked.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I imagine a device could save the GPS coordinates when it associates to an AP. Later, it'd trilaterate from cell towers or GPS to determine when it's close to that location before listening for beacons again.
Skip the drivers altogether and make the modules run their own code. Have the OS offer an API similar to directX that can be expanded when the user installs an app from one of the stores.
Allow a direct com port access mode also for when this is not desired. The app can do what is neccesary.
and self destruct (after releasing some magic smoke & without harming other modules) in five seconds.
that prints odors, especially the one that triggers your anger management therapist's post-hypnotic suggestion to go to your happy place and postpone the anger response that would spike your blood pressure and trigger another cardiac episode.
Yes it really does. You are trusting and executing code from a foreign and untrusted device. You do understand that drivers are software right?
I think you're on to something with the camera though. The camera tends to run the full thickness of the case, and tends to be approximated by a rectangular box. That does make it a candidate for interchangeability.
On the other hand, it tends to become outdated as fast as the rest of the phone, so nobody will want to keep their old camera. At best modularity might let you adjust the price of the device by $50 if you want a better unit. It would be a bit like RAM or flash - something that is trivial to extend from a design standpoint, though nobody is marketing phones by the amount of RAM inside right now.
If you don't trust the USB stick why are you plugging it into your Windows machine?
It is fine if it comes straight from the factory vacuum sealed (although still open to certain risk). If there is common module swapping between phones you get the risk of the device silently transmitting viruses from phone to phone if it simply loads its own driver on plug.
increase Flash: just get a phone with MicroSD support...
Google: funds and markets a "modular and upgradeable" phone for sustainability points; has blanket ban on storage expansion on Nexus devices.