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Google Announces Project Ara Developer Conference, Shows Off First Prototype

Posted by samzenpus on from the save-the-date dept.

An anonymous reader writes Google today announced it will be hosting the second iteration of its Project Ara Module Developers Conference for its modular device project early next year. The first event will be in Mountain View on January 14, 2015, with satellite locations at Google offices in New York City, Buenos Aires, and London. The same agenda will be repeated in Singapore on January 21, 2015, with satellite locations at Google offices in Bangalore, Tokyo, Taipei, and Shanghai. The company also released a video showing off the first prototype from Project Ara. Until now, all we've seen so far are industrial design models. This one actually boots up.

66 comments

  1. Use the technology on a chromebook by tuppe666 · · Score: 0

    Ok I love the idea of a having a phone where I can choose the bits that are important to me. I will buy one of these phones, assuming they can sort out the cost issues(and get it to work)

    What I would be more interested in is parts being interchangeable with a chromebook, although I would want mine to be running debian(based!?) distribution. Hell I think a computer with parts that fit together like sticklebricks is my dream.

    1. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Interchangeable never works.
      By the time you want upgrades, your ports and sockets are obsolete and parts cost more than a new device.

      The lifecycle of interchangeable devices.
      Buy - use - replace.

      So similar to the lighter, thinner, cheaper monolithic designs.

    2. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by binarylarry · · Score: 0

      You truly bring us the truth, my brother. Creativity and innovation are unsustainable!

      Just buy whats popular and remember to OBEY!

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    3. Re:Use the technology on a chromebook by swb · · Score: 1

      There's all kinds of reasons this won't work, but I'm glad someone disagrees and is spending time developing it anyway because it seems like a cool concept and the idea of a modular phone/phablet/tablet/laptop/desktop system is appealing.

      I think a lot of components are rapidly approaching the point where they're good enough for most people -- how many more ppi is Joe Sixpack going to want once a phone is over 300 ppi?

    4. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      The desktop computer I've been upgrading bit by bit begs to disagree with you. As do my interchangeable lens cameras.

    5. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This wasnt as funny as the slave warranty one.. your slipping.

    6. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Good luck with that. You'll find you can't put in faster ram because your motherboard doesn't support it, you can't put in a faster graphics card because your PSU doesn't have enough power, the faster processor isn't pin compatible and there's no room for the bigger cooler needed.

      But hey, hard disks can be added... if you have empty space in the case!

      For everyone of you, there's 500 of me. People who just buy a PC and use it.

      Why you think that because *X* has a feature that feature can translate to a completely different product *Y* is beyond me. Your car can run on diesel, so wouldn't it be better if your phone can run on diesel?? Why is that form of argument valid?

    7. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      May be true on desktops because of independent GPU boards. But for phones etc there are SoCs, meaning the CPU and GPU are on the same chip. For the rest of the phone the bus that Google has picked for this seems more than capable of being future proof.

    8. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > You'll find you can't put in faster ram because your motherboard doesn't support it, you can't put in a faster graphics card because your PSU doesn't have enough power, the faster processor isn't pin compatible and there's no room for the bigger cooler needed.

      Big troll decries component based design. News at 11.

    9. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      For everyone of you, there's 500 of me. People who just buy a PC and use it.

      The ones who buy AMD are convenient to the rest of us because when they cast off their old machine, we'll be able to upgrade it since AMD rides a socket for a long time. It's expensive to go to a new socket, Intel has buckets of money. And also, they tend to have lots of memory bandwidth, so I don't care if I can't upgrade to the new shiny shiny. You just have to get in there before the old memory gets expensive.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    10. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      I used to think desktop computers were upgradable, but it's not really true. Sure, you can bump the RAM and the disk easily, but by the time a new CPU is worth the bother, the socket and chipset have changed, so you need to buy a new motherboard. The new motherboard takes a different kind of RAM. The hard disk might still work if you're lucky (although you may find that the interface type has changed) but it's probably going to be the bottleneck in the new system so you probably want to upgrade it too.

      The last time I upgraded a desktop, I kept the case and optical drive (which I replaced a bit later). I kept the hard disk, but added a second one and eventually stopped using the smaller one. After the next upgrade, I had enough parts to build a completely new desktop. If two upgrade cycles means that you've replaced every single part, then it's simpler and easier to just lengthen the upgrade cycles a bit and by a completely new system.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    11. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Name calling aside, I don't view that as 'design'. It solves none of the problems of modularity 1. some way of adding and removing things that expands and shrinks in size so as not to waste space 2. Some way of accommodating larger modules than the smaller module it replaces (i.e. no fixed module sizes) 3. way of handling thick and thin modules that overlap (its a 3 dimensional world and the modules might be stacked as well as side by side). 4. Some way of accommodating the power demands of future modules. 5. Physically stable connections, at least on par with existing phones. 6. Cost next to nothing to add.

      Having failed to solve the problems of modularity, the *idea* then falls apart, because somebody makes some arbitrary choice as to the size of the modules and which modules exist and how much power and bandwidth is available. That then dictates the limits of all future upgrades.

      So a modular phone that's like the failed MODU phone but without any modules available or even a concrete idea as to what those would be and why they wouldn't already be in the phone.

    12. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by binarylarry · · Score: 1

      The hard disk might still work if you're lucky

      LOLOLOLOL :P

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    13. Re:Use the technology on a chromebook by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      I think the problem is that because this is so much different from the other phones on the market, the price will end up being high. So the people with real concerns about the cost of upgrades won't be able to afford it. The people who will be able to afford it are the people who will go out and buy the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy every year. They have they money to get the newest phone all the time, and upgrading isn't an issue. This isn't going to help the person who buys a Moto G for $180 and uses that for 2-3 years, and then buys a whole new phone. For that person, it will still be cheaper to buy a whole new phone every time they want an upgrade.

      What would really be awesome is getting phones with better support for upgrading the software. Google should figure out a way for people to keep using the same hardware drivers that came with their phone and upgrade the rest of the OS so that people aren't left with 2 year old bugs because they chose the wrong phone and the manufacturer decided not to issue an update. The updates should come straight from Google, and the manufacturer or carrier shouldn't be able to have anything to do with the upgrade process. If they are looking at the advantages of desktops over phones, this is what they should really be striving for.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    14. Re:Use the technology on a chromebook by swb · · Score: 1

      I think some of the technology issues involving size, etc. will eventually get fixed. The price may actually end up being less if the value proposition includes using modules in multiple devices, desktops, etc.

      The software issue is two-pronged -- one, hardware advances so rapidly right now that I mostly give OEMs a break for bad support of older devices (maybe more nods to Apple, less to Android).

      The biggest obstacle for both software and an Ara-like system with modularity is the economics of monolithic device release cycle. OEMs know they can count on a huge amount of sales as entire devices get bought every year.

      It's hard to see Apple or Samsung giving up those economics for the economics of incrementalism or even bothering to support incremental component upgrades.

    15. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by DuckDodgers · · Score: 1

      I have a PC in the house with an AMD X2 4200+ processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD as the primary hard drive. It runs Windows 7, Firefox, Chrome, a basic photo editor, and Minecraft just fine. It boots in under 20 seconds. Most of the components are 8 years old.

      By contrast, a modern smart phone is lucky to provide two years of service before something critical to operation (microphone, speakers, screen) breaks, or it's too slow to keep up with increasingly heavyweight newer versions of Android, or a newer model's camera is three times better. If modularization means that instead of two phones in four years I can use one phone and $150 in miscellaneous repair and upgrade parts that are easy to install, that's still a big win for my budget, my convenience, and a little win for the environment. And at the end of four years instead of having a worthless monolithic gadget, I can re-use or sell the upgrade parts that are still competitive.

    16. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by DuckDodgers · · Score: 1

      The trick is getting a PC with a dedicated PCI-Express x8 or x16 slot that has room in the case to hold a dedicated video card, and can hold at least 8GB of RAM. It doesn't need 8GB when you get it, just make sure the option is there. You also don't need a dedicated video card in the PCI-Express x8 or x16 slot when you buy the machine, just the option to get one. Onboard video cards are fine to start.

      Upgrade 1: increase the available RAM. 8GB is good, more won't hurt but probably doesn't help unless you're a software developer or play with lots of virtual machines.

      Upgrade 2: swap out the primary hard drive with an SSD. (This may be a hassle with Windows licensing. I don't care, I don't run Windows. If you do run Windows, you may need to consult an expert or just buy a new copy.) An SSD makes a huge improvement in responsiveness.

      Upgrade 3: upgrade your video card. If necessary, get a better power supply first.


      Your CPU? You probably don't need to upgrade it. Most applications spend far more time waiting for information from the disk, swapping information from CPU cache to RAM and back, etc... than running a modern 2+ core CPU to its limit. You can get 6-10 years of decent service from any mid-range or better ($100+) modern CPU as-is.

    17. Re:Use the technology on a chromebook by DuckDodgers · · Score: 1

      Right. This is an attempt to commodotize smart phones much further than they already are. The big manufacturers will hate it, because it will drive their profit margins down to nothing. But if it gets enough momentum, they'll have no choice but to get involved. At launch these phones will probably be more expensive than competing monolithic devices. But in five years, maybe a $300 off-contract componentized Android phone will crush an iPhone 9 on specs.

    18. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1
      To address each of your points in turn:

      8GB is RAM was the minimum I was buying 4 years ago. Back then, it was because it was the sweet spot in price per GB. Unfortunately, in some machines it was the most that the board could support and so is now the thing making me ponder replacing the motherboards. Specifically, on my NAS box, because increasing the disks will increase the size of the deduplication tables, meaning that I'll need to increase the size of the RAM to get tolerable performance, meaning I'll need to replace the motherboard and CPU to be able to accommodate more RAM, meaning that I'll end up just keeping the case and optical drive - everything else is upgraded.

      Swap out the hard disk for an SSD? The only machine I've bought in the past 6 years that wasn't SSD-only has been my NAS. The laptop I've just replaced had a 256GB SSD and it was replaced with one that has a 1TB SSD. Buying hard disks hasn't made sense for years unless you need a lot of storage that you rarely access (i.e. NAS / SAN uses), and even then adding an SSD for L2ARC makes sense (as long as you have enough RAM).

      Upgrade the video card? I've not done anything that taxes the GPU in my old laptop, but then I'm not a gamer.

      Not wanting to upgrade the CPU? You claim two bottlenecks. The first is disk to RAM. My laptop's SSD can do over 300MB/s sustained transfer and over 60MB/s on small random files. With a reasonable amount of RAM, the only limiting factor is the SSD write speed, because all of the working set lives in RAM. If you think that RAM to cache bandwidth is a bottleneck, then you're running some very unusual workloads. If you're doing the sorts of things where a 6-10 year old CPU is still fine, then you probably don't need to upgrade the machine at all: my mother was quite happily using a desktop of that sort of vintage, with no upgrades, until she replaced it with a laptop last year.

      For reference, the machines I use when I need a bit more processing power than my laptop have dual (ZFS, mirrored) 3TB disks, 512GB SSDs split between log and cache device and 256GB of RAM. The large log devices speed up write performance, because you're almost always doing sustained linear writes to the spinning rust. The 256GB of RAM means that you very rarely even hit the SSD for loading files. They have 24 cores, and I can very easily saturate them all. If you gave me a 48 core machine, I'd use that instead, but currently the extra performance isn't worth the cost (doubling the number of cores roughly halves the time it takes for various things, but the linear gain is much smaller - going from one hour to half an hour was a big win, so was to quarter of an hour. Going from three minutes to one and a half minutes isn't that exciting).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    19. Re:Use the technology on a chromebook by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      Possibly. But in 5 years, I fully expect a phone that does everything I want a phone to do to cost $100 or less. $300 isn't that cheap for a phone. Sure it's cheaper than a $700 iPhone, but it's still quite high. I don't see the Apple being able to ask $700 for the latest iPhone in 5 years and maintain the level of sales they are used to. There's only so much you can do on a 5 inch phone, especially when they try to make it so thin. If there's a 5 inch device selling for $700 in 5 years, it had better have a full desktop operating system, with HDMI/Displayport out, and USB 3(or whatever version they are up to by then. Then I can carry around an entire computer in my pocket, put it in a doc, and use it like a desktop or laptop.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    20. Re:Use the technology on a chromebook by DuckDodgers · · Score: 1

      I don't know about a full desktop operating system - but it might have one - but what if it's got a 3GHz 64-bit octa-core processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, 3 days between charges, a 4K screen, speakers that don't suck and can be heard 30 feet away, and (maybe most of all in the eyes of the average consumer) an 80MP camera?

      I think the Samsung Galaxy S3 and equivalent competing hardware hit a point where Android was fast enough in day to day use to not be annoying and the pictures were decent. So in that respect, no need to upgrade, period - just buy a new battery as needed and maybe reflash the ROM when bloatware and accumulated cruft gets annoying. But each new generation of phones adds some features consumers seem to be in a hurry to get.

      But more seriously, I think the real thing Google wants is to make the super cheap commodity phones sold in India, rural areas, etc... to get even cheaper, so that they can open the market to another two billion customers. Americans might not care if a commodotized phone is $22 instead of $25 or $9.44 instead of $9.77, but it might make a big deal to someone scraping to get every rupee (or whatever).

    21. Re: Use the technology on a chromebook by DuckDodgers · · Score: 1

      Okay, you're buying much higher end machines than I am, and you do less gaming than my kids do. So you're right, you don't get any room to upgrade.

      I buy mid to low range parts, and then the upgrade options are excellent and I get six to eight years out of every machine. My wild guess is that the same thing will hold for modular smart phones - buy top end, and you've got to replace the whole thing to upgrade. Buy mid range or low range but based on the most modern core architecture, and you can get a lot of upgrades out of it for years.

      I'm jealous of your machines. Nice. :)

  2. good by NotInHere · · Score: 1

    finally I can run a headless phone.

    1. Re:good by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      finally I can run a headless phone.

      It doesn't even have to be a phone. :)

  3. Re:Google should show Android devs some things by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Stop selling shady shitty apps. So sick of these sucker ass app hustlers crying when Apple (and now Google finally) puts an end to their shitty nonsense. Try actually writing a respectable piece of software instead of shit.

  4. A Theif's Dream Come True by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 3, Funny

    Imagine... a phone you can steal tiny little parts out of, rather than the whole phone. It might be minutes or even hours before anybody even notices.

    1. Re:A Theif's Dream Come True by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

      Crap. I can spell "thief". Really I can.

    2. Re:A Theif's Dream Come True by davester666 · · Score: 1

      You'll notice. The thief won't bother with first launching the configuration app and turn off the module before removing it, so your phone will crash.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    3. Re:A Theif's Dream Come True by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 2

      Imagine... a phone you can steal tiny little parts out of, rather than the whole phone. It might be minutes or even hours before anybody even notices.

      Are you serious? You think your little armchairy-10-seconds-of-analysis thought on the security of this device hasn't been covered by google's team of engineers?

      Oh, it has:

      Google says that there will be a “manager” app on the smartphone that controls some kind of locking mechanism, which keeps the modules from popping out when the phone is dropped or twisted.

      --
      There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    4. Re:A Theif's Dream Come True by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      You and Davester666 missed my whole point.

      If you set your phone down next to you in some public place, you'll see it sitting there and everything is fine.

      But somebody could have stolen a module from the side that isn't visible. Sure, you'll notice when you pick it up, I don't dispute that.

      Of course, you probably shouldn't set your phone down like that. But people do.

  5. Oh, it's a phone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not 17th century instrumental music. Disappointed.

  6. Don't learn from the past. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    10-15 years ago. When everybody had nokia feature phones with the changable cases.

    At least twice a week, somebody in the change room @ the gym would drop their phone on the tile floor. It would EXPLODE into a thousand parts like it was spring loaded.

    This is even better :)

    1. Re:Don't learn from the past. by compro01 · · Score: 1

      They did learn. These things aren't clipped together. They're held together with electropermanent magnets.

      --
      upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
    2. Re:Don't learn from the past. by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2

      I remember those exploding Nokia phones. I think that was probably Nokia's best design ever. Not for practical reasons, but every time it happened it made you and everybody else sure that your phone was ruined, only nothing bad ever happened to it, and all of the witnesses were reminded of the Nokia brand in spectacular fashion.

    3. Re:Don't learn from the past. by gweilo8888 · · Score: 2

      Awesome, so your phone can wipe your credit cards and (more likely, because they have a lower coercivity) hotel room keys. What a feature!

    4. Re:Don't learn from the past. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The phones were resistance *because* they exploded into a thousand pieces.
      Nokia's quality certainly was part of the equation, but the phone disassembling itself spread the impact energy through all the individual parts, reducing the damage potential.

      Modern phones do not have that luxury since most of the device is a fragile glass screen.

    5. Re:Don't learn from the past. by zenith1111 · · Score: 1

      Mobile phones have very powerful magnets in their speakers and they don't usually cause problems like that, do they? Maybe they have very good mu-metal shields in the sepakers.

      That is valid concern but, as far as I know, magnetic cards are mostly being replaced with smartcards or RFID, that might not be an issue in a couple of years. I've not used the magnetic stripes in my cards in a long time, the ICs are so cheap and functional that using smartcards or RFID instead of magnetic stripe is a no-brainer in most applications.

    6. Re: Don't learn from the past. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Phones can wipe magnetic strips on transit cards. Done it many times.

  7. only for nerds by ezakimak · · Score: 1, Interesting

    No one in the mass market will buy this. So many already can hardly handle a one-piece phone/tablet/laptop/computer/device. Women will not buy it simply because it's ugly.

    "Oh, but you can upgrade the camera" you say? Anyone that is so much into photography that they need a better camera will buy...... a *real camera*. You know, with interchangeable, actual high-quality, purposeful lenses.

    "Oh, but you can just upgrade the screen or processor" you say? Prediction: the upgrade path for any generation chassis will be limited to only one or two steps, then you need a new chassis. Just like with motherboards (because that's what the chassis is).

    Now, doing this for laptops... that's the real question--why haven't they done this *yet*. (And no, just because you can aggravatingly, pain-stakingly pry open a laptop to service it and in some cases interchange some parts does not qualify).

    This seems like such a step backwards. Are they going to go through the whole 1980/90s plug-and-pray interoperability nightmare again? This is one reason Apple became so dominant--they locked down the hardware, supported a canned set of options, and made their hardware compatibility issues mostly a non-issue. Their stuff *just worked*.

    Also, what about the additional avenue of security holes: counterfeit modules, hacked modules, modules swapped out when you're not looking, etc. The android security/permisisons model is already poor at best for the masses.

    1. Re:only for nerds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I used to hate "the Apple way" until I actually tried it and now I realize it's just more efficient than wasting time upgrading this and that every 6 months or whatever. Just buy the best workstation/laptop you can afford and you'll get 3-5 years where you don't even have to think about hardware and can just focus on productive shit. Only amateur PC technicians who think inhaling dust off a motherboard while untangling wires is exciting will want this crap. If you're over 18 and still think assembling a PC is cool and/or difficult then you may have a developmental disorder.

    2. Re:only for nerds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I used to hate "the Apple way" until I actually tried it and now I realize it's just more efficient than wasting time upgrading this and that every 6 months or whatever. Just buy the best workstation/laptop you can afford and you'll get 3-5 years where you don't even have to think about hardware and can just focus on productive shit. Only amateur PC technicians who think inhaling dust off a motherboard while untangling wires is exciting will want this crap. If you're over 18 and still think assembling a PC is cool and/or difficult then you may have a developmental disorder.

      It's far more cost efficient for me to order a supermicro chassis, throw in procs, ram, motherboard, and drives, and load up FreeNAS w/ ZFS for a storage array than it would be to spend 4-6x that much on some vendor's pre-packaged solution. Put it together, run some tasks in a loop, and come back in a week to make sure everything's still ticking.

    3. Re:only for nerds by gweilo8888 · · Score: 1

      For a phone, I agree modularity (other than the battery) is a bad idea. For a desktop or notebook PC, I couldn't disagree more.

      The ability to upgrade my machines isn't there for adding stuff willy-nilly every six months. It is there for adding stuff when I *need* to, and allowing me to choose what best fits my needs in the first place. My desktop PC will last me five years easily (it is already more than three years old and still far more powerful than I need for current games, applications like high-definition video editing, raw file editing using DxO Labs' PRIME denoising engine, and so on.) But I am able to make large or small upgrades as and when I want, and quite likely, will extend my PC beyond that five year window. The same for my notebook, to a slightly lesser extent. (Although it's enterprise-grade, and so unusually upgradeable for a notebook.)

      And the best thing? Both exceeded the specs of Apple hardware at the time I bought them, and were only half to two-thirds the price of equivalent Apple hardware at purchase. Apple's pricing is a tax on the stupid and the bone-idle.

    4. Re:only for nerds by gweilo8888 · · Score: 1

      Now, doing this for laptops... that's the real question--why haven't they done this *yet*. (And no, just because you can aggravatingly, pain-stakingly pry open a laptop to service it and in some cases interchange some parts does not qualify).

      They have done it -- you just have to pay enterprise pricing if you want this feature. Look at HP's ZBook series for one example. Slide one latch and the entire bottom pops off, revealing the hard drive bay, DIMM sockets, mSATA slot and wireless LAN card without removing a single screw. Removing the hard drive means taking out one screw the first time, but it is designed so that it will latch in place without the screw if you want regular hard drive swaps. And the full, extremely detailed service manual is available free to all, should you decide you need to access parts that aren't typically upgraded on a notebook.

    5. Re:only for nerds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's untrue, it hasn't been cost efficient to assemble your own PC for a long time. PC makers run on slim (even negative) margins, and the small PC builders are no more.

      Low *COST* isn't even offered as a benefit of this modularity. All those frames and magnets and interconnects and the electronics that drive the interconnects, all cost money, space etc..

      It's dumb, they're chopped up the phone into arbitrary rectangles, and as a result any upgrade would have to fit in those rectangles. Have spare space in one module? In a retail phone they can use that space for battery, in this phone not. Want to run a longer antenna inside? Tough, its as big as its module and no more. Lots of drawbacks and no benefits.

      But hey, the PC market of old did ok with upgrades right? So (assuming timetravel is invented) we can send this phone back into the past and it will sell!

    6. Re:only for nerds by dixonpete · · Score: 1

      I have a Galaxy S sitting in my closet that's perfectly functional save for a loose USB power connector. Without that connector the phone is crippled to the point of being useless. Repairing it would cost more than the phone is worth. Multiply that by 10's of millions of phones per year falling into the same in the same state across North America. That's just wrong.

    7. Re:only for nerds by pushing-robot · · Score: 1

      I can't imagine this will see serious adoption in its current form.

        On the other hand, I can see this leading to phone designs with one, two, or a strip of small replaceable I/O modules along an edge, for people who want custom addons or this year's new $feature without carrying around adapters or replacing their phone.

      People might want a camera with a bit of optical zoom, or a MicroSD card reader, or a bigger speaker, or for this crowd even an XJACK-type pop-out ethernet jack.

      By constraining expansions to simple peripherals, modules could use a more foolproof bus like USB and give people ninety percent of the benefits of Ara with ten percent of the penalty.

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    8. Re:only for nerds by pushing-robot · · Score: 1

      I hate to break it to you, but even if it had a working power plug a Galaxy S would be crippled to the point of useless today. Smartphones have been improving fast...really fast. That phone is somewhere less than 5% as fast as today's models, equivalent to a very early P4 in PC terms. I'd be very surprised if many modern apps and web sites worked acceptably on it. And if you don't care about those, get a dirt cheap dumb phone with better battery life.

      PCs have been 'fast enough' for a while, at least when coupled with solid state storage. Phones are catching up, though they've got a few generations to go before they reach desktop-level performance (never imagined I'd say that). By 2020 a phone could be a long-term purchase (and we'll have moved on to the next hot gadget), but not yet.

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    9. Re:only for nerds by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      They have done it -- you just have to pay enterprise pricing if you want this feature. Look at HP's ZBook series for one example. Slide one latch and the entire bottom pops off, revealing the hard drive bay, DIMM sockets, mSATA slot and wireless LAN card without removing a single screw.

      Can you actually, meaningfully swap the GPU yet? Most of the time there are fitment and cooler issues. And I note you didn't list the CPU socket. Most of my laptops for years have had socketed CPUs.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    10. Re:only for nerds by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Repairing it would cost more than the phone is worth.

      Having it repaired, sure. But this is news for nerds. Can't you fix it yourself for a few bucks?

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    11. Re:only for nerds by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      I did this for my NAS, but it was more expensive than an HP microserver with a similar form factor. The only reason that I did it was that I wanted to be able to use the machine for XBMC so I wanted a slightly better GPU. The only bit that I'm likely to upgrade is the disks, and even then I had to make some compromises (the case has 4 removable disk bays and a slimline optical drive bay, but I couldn't find a motherboard that had everything I wanted and more than 4 SATA slots, so I can't use one of the disk bays).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    12. Re:only for nerds by c · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No one in the mass market will buy this.

      Nonsense. You just haven't been paying attention. The market is already buying modular phones. It's just that the modularity sucks, hard.

      What do you think those battery cases are? MHL/OTG dongles? Just modules with extra ports. iPhone camera lenses? Infrared camera adapters? Pressy (extra hardware button that fits in the headphone jack)? Dimple (stick on NFC-based hardware buttons)? Wireless charging plates that fit in behind the battery and plug into the USB port?

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    13. Re:only for nerds by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

      In theory, the answer is a qualified "maybe". Most new laptop discrete video cards connect via mini-PCIe, and I believe there's some anecdotal degree of physical compatibility between Alienware/Dell and someone else (Clevo, I think). As a practical matter, if you you're talking about buying a better video card on eBay that was explicitly designed for your exact model (say, upgrading from the cheapest ATI card to the best Quadro), you'll probably be OK. Everything else is a crapshoot.

      Apparently, screw holes are a big, big problem with cross-device compatibility... different laptops put them in different places, even when the electrical interface, shape, thickness, and cooling arrangements are compatible.

      There are actually a lot of relatively upgradable laptops out there (as long as you don't insist on one that's a glued/laminated-together 1mm-thick Apple-inspired abomination that's built like a cell phone). The problem is, it's nearly impossible to make any kind of informed purchase decision in advance of actually buying anything. The information you need just plain isn't reliably available until some brave soul tries doing it, takes pics, measures things, and posts the pics to his blog. Thinkpads are somewhat of an exception... but Lenovo made a new mess of their own (and got lots & lots of hate) when they started whitelisting specific mPCIe cards in the EFI BIOS and refusing to enable cards not on the list.

      Put another way, there's a lot that can go wrong, and you're at least as likely to burn cash on parts with limited resale value that won't ultimately work, and can often be purchased only used on eBay from sellers who harvested them from broken laptops bought for scrap.

    14. Re:only for nerds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just priced out 160 nodes. Not much cheaper to build from parts. For me, its worth the warranty that comes with the prebuilt.
      Storage clusters offer better value than compute clusters when building from parts, but only if your time is paid for and you don't have anything better to do with your time than assemble parts that are available ready to use off the shelf.

  8. Stupid ill conceived going nowhere by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you watch the heavily edited video you can see the whole thing is SLOW. It looks like the interconnects are slow serial or narrow bandwidth connections, that add a huge lag. Even simple things like the screen zoom animation are cut in the middle to remove the jitter.

    Also if you think Apple has problems with phones bending in the pocket, this one has lots of connectors held in by friction and wishful thinking.

    This is dumb, do you need to bring it to market to see how dumb it is Google? Do you seriously need to try to sell this, then fail badly, only to realize it?

    Get a grip! The area that needs work is Android. It needs a window system suitable for fingers not mice, an appropriate launcher etc. It should be on larger tablets, nobody wants a 20 inch full screen calculator but that's what you offer.

    Instead you're twiddling with modular handsets???? Handsets that can't change the big things of a phone, size and screen???? So modular phones that aren't modular but have *some* limited modularity in exchange for lots of drawbacks. And people are supposed to want that why?

  9. False dichotomy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's not modular = creative, monolithic = non-creative.

    There's nothing inventive or creative about this phone other than its modular, and that's badly done at great expense to the phone. Conversely the modularity imposes limits on what can be designed and added, because the original frame had to be already designed with assumptions about the modules. So you might want to add a rear facing radar module, but there's no spare slot for it. But a monolithic design can simply come out with a new radar phone.

    It's like a dumb middle management design meeting Person #1 "How can we make some new phone feature"....Person #2 "well PCs can be upgraded in bits [but mostly aren't], so we could make the phone upgraded..." Person #1 "Cool, that sounds creative [because I can't tell face farts from creativity]".

  10. Want by rrohbeck · · Score: 1

    Assuming there will be a mSATA slot available (to plug in a 1TB SSD) and a PCIe interconnect to do SMP with the 32-core 64-bit ARM system I see in my future. And to drive an external GPU for the big-ass display of course.

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  11. Soundtrack? Really? by stinkbomb · · Score: 1

    Why on earth does every video have a soundtrack? I find it extremely distracting from the presentation to have music playing, but this isn't even in the background; it dominates my attention I really believe that having so much music omnipresent in our daily lives diminishes the value that we place on music. And it distracts me from the message the video is really trying to convey: what do you want me to pay attention to; the content or the music? Sorry, I'm too dumb to pay attention to both.

  12. Link to the video by 3dr · · Score: 1

    Dear submitter, if you want to include text that says "they have released a video, here's the link" then link to the video, not some ad-laden secondary site.

    The video is on youtube, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  13. Seems to have a lot of negative comments... by ericbrow · · Score: 1

    And I'm not saying any of them are wrong. But I'm also thinking of the potential of what these could do. Infrared camera module, blood-sugar testing module are two things that come to my mind.

  14. Editors should edit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The summary should summarize the body of the article, and also contain enough to explain the headline.

    Unfortunatly "Project Ara" isn't described, and it's not a common enough phrase that everyone reading the site will recognize.