Slashdot Mirror
Google Announces Project Ara Developer Conference, Shows Off First Prototype
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.
finally I can run a headless phone.
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.
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?
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.
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
The desktop computer I've been upgrading bit by bit begs to disagree with you. As do my interchangeable lens cameras.
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.
Awesome, so your phone can wipe your credit cards and (more likely, because they have a lower coercivity) hotel room keys. What a feature!
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.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
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.'"
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
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.
The hard disk might still work if you're lucky
LOLOLOLOL :P
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
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?...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.