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Google To Test Build-It-Yourself Ara Smartphones In Puerto Rico
An anonymous reader writes Google is holding its second Project Ara developer's conference today in Mountain View and is in the process of giving a roadmap on how and when it might get its modular smartphones out into the market. Probably the most notable bit of news we've learned so far is that Google plans to have a market pilot ready to go in the second half of this year. Unfortunately, if you want to give it a shot, you'll need to live in Puerto Rico — the pilot will roll out in that territory in partnership with carriers OpenMobile and Claro. When Project Ara hits Puerto Rico, users should be able to customize their devices using the Ara Marketplace and Ara Configurator apps. Google's ATAP group will also roll out some "food-truck" style stores for consumers to actually check these devices out before they try them out. Google also says that it'll have some 20 to 30 Ara modules available by launch across 10 different categories.
Does anyone know whether the drivers for all those wonderful devices will be open source? Will they have open APIs at least, or will I have to install the app of the vendor instead, where some "extra features" cost money? Will I give every device connected to my smartphone basically root access, or access to a system bus which can be used to read and write arbitrary data to RAM?