Google's Modular Smartphone Almost Ready

I saw an advert about a mobile phone; it had all the specs I could dream of – 5.5 inch display, 10-megapixel camera, 4GB RAM, blah blah blah…. I was excited, I had to get this phone and I did [before nko]. I thought I had landed, all the people that had bad-belle against me started following me because they felt I was carrying gold. A lot of people wanted to be me. Trust me; I was drinking all the hype. This continued for some weeks and then suddenly, everything stopped. I was no longer the queen of the arena. I realized there was someone that had a phone that was badder than the baddest. So I decided to step up and I bought the latest phone. Once again, the camera was on me [SUPERSTAR!]. Then one day I realized my bank account was suffering just because I wanted to keep up. I was struggling to pay my bills because I wanted to have the gadgets with the best specs. Then I gave up. I was tired of changing my phone over and over. I had to stick to the last one I had and watch other people get the best phones; until Google brought up Project Ara, the solution to my problem.

So this project is about a phone that has interchangeable parts that can be swapped to make your phone exactly what you want. You can replace the screen with an E Ink display for reading on a long journey, add a wide-angle camera module, and add a larger battery. Cool right?

When Google brought this up at first, it seemed impossible and it was obstructed by hardware delays. But now, this dream sounds like it’s almost ready. At Google I/O, the Ara team demoed its swappable modules, swiping in a camera and snapping a pic all without rebooting the phone unlike the LG G5. Rafa Camargo, the lead engineer of this project, placed the phone on the table and said, “Okay Google, eject the camera.” Then the phone’s camera popped out of its socket, all by itself.

But the new Project Ara isn’t designed to let you swap out core components like the processor — now, they’re all built right in. “When we did our user studies, what we found is that most users don’t care about modularizing the core functions,” Camargo explained. “They expect them all to be there, to always work, and to be consistent.” He added.

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 and an expanded memory module. And with Ara, you’re not limited to just one speaker: 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.

Google will be building the first consumer version of Ara all by itself. While every previous flagship android handset has been built by one of Google’s partners -most recently Huawei and LG- Ara is the first handset that Google has ever designed from scratch.

When it arrives next year, the Ara team says the basic version should cost around the same amount as other premium smartphones, with performance on par. So you see Google has my best interest at heart, and I love them for that.