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Google Cancels Project Ara Modular Smartphone Plans, Says Report (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google has "suspended" work on Project Ara, the initiative to build a phone with interchangeable modules for various components like cameras and batteries, according to Reuters and Recode. The company reportedly may license the technology to other partners, but will not release a phone itself. The decision is said to be part of an effort to unify Google's hardware development under former Motorola president Rick Osterloh. Although Project Ara has always seemed a dubious commercial prospect, the news is surprising if only because Google made a renewed effort to push the modular concept at its I/O conference earlier this year, promising a developer version for fall and a consumer release for 2017. Google's Project Ara was originally spearheaded by Motorola to reinvent the smartphone in a form made up of hot-swappable modules that consumers can configure as they choose, then upgrade later as new technologies emerge. RIP Project Ara.
ah NO. please do some research BEFORE recommending fairphone to people. you'll notice that Fairphone has REMOVED (reneged on) their promise to provide a "Fair OS". their naivety (and the fact that they haven't listened to extremely experienced software libre developers) is well-documented - a good example is here: http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/...
the Fairphone is only "modular" if you are mechanically-minded. i know of people who are competent engineers who, in attempting to repair a laptop, have managed accidentally to destroy FPC12 connectors because they weren't anticipating quite how tiny and fragile they would be.
"Modularity" also doesn't really solve the problem of chipsets being proprietary *and* insecure - google "900 million qualcomm android security vulnerability". you have to actually *design* the phone in *advance* to take into account these sorts of things. Neither google nor Fairphone have done that.