The news has been outed by none other than Google itself via a brand new promo video for its Project Ara.
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The big news arrived at the horizon when Google plans to start selling its Project Ara modular phones in 2017, with replaceable parts the first phone ever be manufactured by the tech giant, awaiting introduction by next year.
Project Ara technical project lead Rafa Camargo said that they have already developed and built all of the key components for the platform, WIRED reported. The new Ara frame contains six slots for a CPU, GPU, antennas, sensors, battery and display.
The developer version of Ara will ship this fall, while the consumer version will hit sometime in 2017. Ara chief Richard Woolridge said the modules can handle pretty much anything, consuming a third as much power as USB 3.
Ara isn’t the only Android phone banking on customization. Ara chief Richard Woolridge spits out insane edit-video-while-you-computer-vision use cases, but says the spec boils down to this: It can handle anything.
Google wants to revolutionize how you use and buy smartphones by creating a device where you can swap out different parts of its hardware on the go, like the battery, camera, speakers, or screen. And while the first incarnations of Project Ara envisioned users being able to swap out all sorts of components, from a device’s RAM to its processor, Google wisely reconsidered and has since limited the number of swappable modules. You can head through the settings and manually tell the system that you are going to eject and change a module, much like you would on a computer when ejecting a connected hard drive, or you can simply voice command tell Google by saying something along the lines of “OK Google”.
In a quick video, we can see people using Soli in object recognition (based on this video, it’s very accurate), 3D imaging, predictive drawing, in-car remote, security, visualization, and even music, where you hover your hand over a Soli device to create different tones and melodies.
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Considering the ATAP team’s early progress, it seemed for a while that the predicted launch in 2016 was at lease plausible. The Ara page says this “frees up more room for hardware in each module”, but it also removes Ara’s promise of upgradability. Google made the announcement today, adding that a consumer version of the phone will be available next year. Do you think modular smartphones will work?
