Inside project Ara: Google plans to disrupt the smartphone market, releasing a "lego-like" phone
Ara and Google plans to disrupt the smartphone market by unleashing a "lego-like" phone that lets you swap in interchangeable parts to get new abilities.
The Phone You Can Truly Customize
In the three years since work first started on Ara, the modular phone has always seemed like a pipe dream, and Google has always treated it that way. It's been part of the company's ATAP division -- Advanced Technologies and Products -- a skunkworks explicitly tasked with turning such fantasies, like sensors you can swallow, into consumer reality.
Advantages of Ara
When the Project Ara Developer Edition ships this fall, it will come with four modules to start: a speaker, a camera, an E-Ink display (like the one you'd find on an Amazon Kindle e-reader) and an expanded memory module. Those might not sound all that exciting, but they're all things that even high-end smartphones don't necessarily do well.
And with Ara, you're not limited to just one: you'll be able to turn Ara into a boom box with multiple speakers and multiple batteries snapped into the phone's six module slots. With even the standard integrated battery, Camargo says we should expect a full day of battery life from the consumer version of Ara, and he estimates that adding a single modular battery should boost that by roughly 45 percent.
But cameras, batteries and speakers are just the low-hanging fruit: the Ara team believes its platform will open the floodgates for third-party hardware developers to build all sorts of products that never would have made it into smartphones before -- from a wireless car key fob (Camargo says he has a working prototype) to a one-use pepper spray dispenser. BACtrack, a company specializing in alcohol breathalyzers, is also on board.
"We know that people are going to build crazy stuff, and that's OK," says Blaise Bertrand, ATAP's head of creative and marketing chief. "In fact, we're looking forward to this."
The Phone You Can Truly Customize
In the three years since work first started on Ara, the modular phone has always seemed like a pipe dream, and Google has always treated it that way. It's been part of the company's ATAP division -- Advanced Technologies and Products -- a skunkworks explicitly tasked with turning such fantasies, like sensors you can swallow, into consumer reality.
Advantages of Ara
When the Project Ara Developer Edition ships this fall, it will come with four modules to start: a speaker, a camera, an E-Ink display (like the one you'd find on an Amazon Kindle e-reader) and an expanded memory module. Those might not sound all that exciting, but they're all things that even high-end smartphones don't necessarily do well.
And with Ara, you're not limited to just one: you'll be able to turn Ara into a boom box with multiple speakers and multiple batteries snapped into the phone's six module slots. With even the standard integrated battery, Camargo says we should expect a full day of battery life from the consumer version of Ara, and he estimates that adding a single modular battery should boost that by roughly 45 percent.
But cameras, batteries and speakers are just the low-hanging fruit: the Ara team believes its platform will open the floodgates for third-party hardware developers to build all sorts of products that never would have made it into smartphones before -- from a wireless car key fob (Camargo says he has a working prototype) to a one-use pepper spray dispenser. BACtrack, a company specializing in alcohol breathalyzers, is also on board.
"We know that people are going to build crazy stuff, and that's OK," says Blaise Bertrand, ATAP's head of creative and marketing chief. "In fact, we're looking forward to this."
When will the phone be released?
ReplyDeleteDon't know really but it's an upcoming tech
DeleteNo date yet, but I'll get more info about it
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