Google’s new CFO Ruth Porat, who will become new chief financial officerofAlphabet, stated last month that the company is trying to further limit expenses.
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Changes have been made behind the scenes and the Puerto Rico rollout has been sidelined, although Project Ara claims it will hit the country soon. The island has a good mix of smartphone and basic-phone owners, and 75 percent of Internet access takes place on mobile devices.
After a long period of radio silence following a photo posted from Google I/O back in May, the project’s Twitter account posted first that it had some updates to share, then that there would be a “market pilot re-route” but “don’t worry, #ProjectAra isn’t going anywhere, #just recalculating” … Essentially each major component would be swap-able, pretty much like how a PC is when adding new, or upgrading, different components like RAM, hard drives, etc. The modular phone would work basically the same way, allowing users to swap out, as an example, their phones default RAM for more.
While it has shown off the tech at an event here and there, however, and it’s been recruiting hardware and software developers to fiddle around based on its open design plans, an actual, working Project Ara handset has never been seen in the wild.
It seems the Puerto Rico launch is off, at least for now. Puerto Rico will simply not the site of the test launch.
In January Google said it would have a pilot launch for Project Ara in Puerto Rico during the second half of 2015. The company didn’t offered details about the new market. It is still unclear where the new market will be.
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The initiative is Google’s effort to shake up how people purchase smartphones by usingexchangeable parts, which means customers could select a camera from one manufacturer, a processor from another, and display from yet another maker to build a personalized device. The project is supposed to come up with a phone with interchangeable parts.
