(Tech) Google's Project Ara phone

Google's modular Project Ara phone concept will get publicly tested by 100 members of the public through a program called Ara Scouts. The modular phone experiment was born out of Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) team and now it seems that 100 members of the public will be receiving an earlyprototype to test, use, and provide Google with feedback on how to improve Ara before it gets released commercially sometime early next year.

Though the 100 Ara Scouts winners were selected, at this point it's unclear when their prototypes will ship and when they will actually be able to hold the phones in their hands. To be selected, Ara Scouts competed in missions, with the most active participants being selected. Describing the program, Google says: " After 9 missions with participation from over 30K people across 111 countries, we're bringing the Ara Scouts program to a close. As many of you may have seen at our recent Google I/O presentation, the team's focus over the next 8 months will be to bring our functional prototype into reality. We'll be reaching out to our 100 most active Ara Scouts soon, letting them know that they'll be among the first to get an Ara phone outside our team."

Project Ara is initially slated for a January 2015 launch, but the 8-month window that's stated with the close of the Ara Scouts program suggests that the launch date may now be postponed to March 2015.

Source: GigaOm

(Ideas) Phonebloks: Modular Phone Snaps Together Like LEGO Bricks So You Never Have to Throw It Away

It seems like most people get a new cellphone every year these days – and while that’s good news for phone manufacturers and telecoms, it’s not helping our wallets or the environment. Enter PhoneBloks – a brilliant concept phone made from a series of modular components that can be snapped together like LEGO bricks. As technology continues to evolve at an ever-increasing clip, individual parts of the phone can be swapped out instead of tossing the whole thing away.

Istead of the wasteful smartphone upgrade process that creates landfills of discarded phones, designer Dave Hakkens suggests a new type of phone made up of modules, or bloks, that can easily be replaced over time, piece by piece.

Want more storage? Take out the old memory module and replace that. You could do the same thing for the processor, camera, screen, and virtually any piece of the entire phone. The only thing that stays the same is a board that all the modules plug into like LEGO pieces.

It seems like a simple idea that someone should have built already, but while the concept is feasible, this new modular design introduces some problems in reality. You could theoretically take all the guts out of a smartphone and make them modular, because they already start off as individual parts. However, creating enclosures and universal plugs for each piece would make your device much bigger than pocket size and more expensive as well. Also, don’t drop it – otherwise you’ll have a phone split in more pieces than just a cracked screen.

The idea of being able to take apart, fix and improve consumer electronics is enticing, and the phone has already caught the world’s attention with a “social reach” of nearly 250 billion people – but we’ll remain skeptical until it actually happens.