As someone with similar interests in a large Finnish company...

God help the antenna engineers assigned to this project.

Whether the antenna is part of the "endo" (and thus subject to interference from potentially unknown external modules) or àn external component itself (and thus subject to interference from potentially unknown adjacent modules) it's going to be an unholy nightmare to try and engineer.

That said, I would love if they could figure some sort of genius solution to the problem and further this concept. Wild things like this are exactly what Motorola should be doing (along with continuing to iterate on the solid Moto X)

I remember the thread about phoneblocks and how it was never going to happen, who would have known that Motorolla was working on something similar for almost a year at the time.

Hope Dave gets something out of it, besides the warm and fuzzy feeling that Motorolla makes a product that is similar to his idea.

While the Phonebloks concept got a lot of hype, I haven't seen any mention of Modu, an Israel based phone manufacturer (startup). They introduced the first modular phone but it wasn't never a success and the company went bankrupt in 2011. Interestingly enough, Google bought their patents and now we have a modular phone concept from Google owned Motorola.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modu

It looks pretty on paper, but it can't ever compete with a properly designed and executed product in the real world. The reason Apple can get their devices so small is the complete omission of connectors and other internal padding. This thing (whatever it is) will just be a mess of connectors and other supporting hardware- a monolith of extendability that will never be used by an end user. Any extendability it has will be stunted by the bus abatable to it; you won't get an external screen or upgraded processor on a flimsy usb-alike connector.

I would wager that almost every "reconfigurable" device or product just ends up in a single setting, which would have been better off being found during product testing and the rest of the configurations ignored.

Phones are too cheap -- and getting cheaper. And I suspect most people find just simply selecting a fully-baked phone intimidating enough.

The actual market for this kind of device would be tiny. (Why I suspect this won't even make it to market.)

This is just Motorola brand marketing.

Now finally, I can build a coffee brewer attachment. http://pomegranatephone.com/

I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about how technically feasible this actually is (under a single discussion thread).

[1] Sirkneeland states that it's going to be tough to engineer the antenna

[2] nwh states that "Any extendability it has will be stunted by the bus abatable to it; you won't get an external screen or upgraded processor on a flimsy usb-alike connector"

Any other thoughts?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632641 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632597

I don't get why anyone would want a modular phone. It's so backwards from where we are heading. Promise you a non-modular phone will be smaller, lighter, etc. The slight variations in how people customize a phone... guarantee they'd be happier finding a phone they liked and buying it. Plus... phones aren't expensive, why not just throw them out ever 18 months?

If you've read Clayton Christensen's books, you know that after "integration" comes "disintegration"/modularization when the market becomes mature enough, just like it did in the PC world many years ago.

This might be what disintegration looks like for smartphones. Maybe our devices won't be just black boxes we can't get into in the future.

From Geoffrey Moore's books (Crossing the Chasm, etc) we also know that when a market becomes "mature"/saturated, the companies start to "mass customize" their products. We can already see the beginning of that trend with multiple colors for devices, multiple backs, etc, instead of the previous just black, or black and white.

Notice that this announcement was 10 hours before the phoneblocks "Thunderclap" to 970,000 social media accounts, as well as the speculated Nexus 5 announcement. Interesting timing.

I can't see this working for consumer phones in the short term (though long term we'll get to the Beats Audio stage where the tech is completely commodified and the packaging will become all important).

However, right now it seems ideal as a prototyping platform, or even a way to produce short runs of devices that need (most of) a commodity smartphone plus a couple of random sensors or connectors.

I'm the tech lead at dscout.com, the tool that Motorola is using to run the "Project Ara Research". The design team behind the product it is personally running the research effort, so if you have ideas or comments you may want to check it out.

Any feedback you submit is going to them directly.

[1] http://dscout.com/ara

This seems like mostly PR.

Now if Motorola could give us a good usable mesh router for the masses, that would be something with actual impact.

In a day and age where computers are seeing more soldering and glue than ever I am hard pressed to believe that anything like this would ever see the light of day, production-wise.

It's a neat concept but building a mobile device is more than just schluffing together a bunch of random parts.

This could be a huge win for Motorola. Say they control/patent the shell and the communications interface. It's easy and cheap to build. They charge $99 for it with great margins. All this while module builders compete both for price and features.

Since this is open, the winner in this market will be the company who can build the best ecosystem. Who can do that better than Google?

And it would be almost impossible for Samsung to compete, since they are a highly integrated company.

The interesting reaction would be from apple: they are highly integrated so hard to move to this model but they also know how to build ecosystems.

If Google builds something compelling, I'm grabbing my popcorn.

Come to think of it, both projects look to be inspired by Bug Labs' modules.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_Labs

This interesting thing about what they have in their example is there not all phones need to be 100% modular. that blue phone looks like a normal phone with only one modular point.

Best of both worlds

I've actually never seen the idea of a phoneblock but it sounds awesome. I've always wanted a mass spectrometer on my phone (okay maybe that is asking a bit too much).

"how do we bring the benefits of an open hardware ecosystem to 6 billion people?"

What about the remaining billion?

This design reminds me of The Centurions (http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/c/centurion.htm). Good times.

One missing piece (or at least, not shown, and not sure how it would conflict in their puzzle like approach) is a hardware keyboard. Mostly for that i prefer Jolla's other half idea for modularity.

Well, I'll be dammed.

Did anyone notice the cat with the sunglasses "module"?

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I wonder what the phoneblock team is thinking right now...

Between this and PhoneBloks, I've seen hardly anything in the comments aside from a circlejerk of tech-savvy people bashing this idea and beating the same issues like a dead horse.

I think that a major part of criticism that PhoneBloks received was largely due in part to the fact that the video lacked any proof of the author's technical expertise regarding mobile devices and their components. As a technical community, we've trained ourselves to sense that, like a shark smells blood in the water.

And it offends us, that someone can receive recognition for this kind of technical idea without having the background knowledge we do. So we repulse it, mock it, and put it down. By riding on the coattails of the PhoneBloks campaign, Motorola has now become a target of this same type of ridicule.

What we fail to see is how damaging this criticism can be. Such fierce, hostile, knee-jerk backlash from the technical community towards PhoneBloks will only serve to dissuade people (tech-savvy or not) to speak up about their ideas, creating a community where only the thoughts of experts are respected at the detriment to creativity.

Yes, this project poses a set of difficult challenges. So did introducing interchangeable parts to the rifle manufacturing process in the 18th-19th centuries. No, we're not entirely sure what we will be able to do once we've accomplished this goal. That didn't stop us from trying to go to the moon in the 1960's. We choose to do these things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

So, I say "Good for you, Motorola". You (no doubt infused with that famous Google spirit) decided to take a moonshot. If Motorola succeeds, they'll change the way we purchase and upgrade our phones, and likely reduce a good amount of e-waste in the process. And even if they fail, there's no doubt that new breakthroughs along the way will lead to improvements to their own technologies.

I guess the overall point I'm trying to make is to temper your criticism and give constructive feedback. It's easy to say "This will never work." It's easy to go along with popular opinion. It takes just one person to challenge the status quo for an idea to come to life.

Not being asian and reading a few years ago that the company started calling itself MOTO for the difficult it is to pronounce the full name with asian phonetics, Ara is a kick in the balls and I feel sorry for them choosing that name.