Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works 126
An anonymous reader writes Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group demonstrated Tango, a tablet with 3D cameras similar to Microsoft's Kinect and a version of the Ara phone that could almost boot to the Android home screen (it froze during the demo) at Google I/O today. Project Ara will give $100,000 to anyone who can create an Ara module that does something current smartphones can't. From the article: "Ara moved from concept render to physical mockup in about six months, and onstage today Google demonstrated a version of the phone that could just about boot to the Android home screen. In the demo above, the phone displayed a partial boot screen before freezing. The full boot time (had the demo worked as intended) would be about a minute, which would be a long time for a shipping phone but is reasonably impressive for such an early prototype. Software is the other thing that Ara's developers need to figure out. Current Android builds ship with support for the hardware the phone runs, but they don't include a whole bunch of extraneous drivers for other modems or Wi-Fi modules or cameras or SoCs. Current phone hardware doesn't change, so Android doesn't typically need to worry about this kind of thing."
maybe not sex toys (Score:3, Interesting)
1. approach woman at bar, place phone on bar next to drink
2. phone takes baseline body temps of said woman
3. chat with woman for 5 minutes
4. phone takes update body temps to see where the blood is flowing
5. pick up phone and get 1 to 10 scale on how "excited" the woman was with me
could work on men too just have to look for different "hot spots"
Re:"Almost" works? (Score:1, Interesting)
Considering that it even displayed a boot screen. It means their pll(s), power distribution management(s), board support package(s), hardware design managed to get all the components and interconnects to a functional state.
That actually is very impressive given the timeline. Once you're at this point, figuring out the configurations changes needed to get things running smoothly is comparatively trivial.
Interchangable crypto modules (Score:4, Interesting)
One for the business, or for each business, one for the kids, one for the wife, and one for the mistress.