Google Announces Project Ara Developer Conference, Shows Off First Prototype

An anonymous reader writes Google today announced it will be hosting the second iteration of its Project Ara Module Developers Conference for its modular device project early next year. The first event will be in Mountain View on January 14, 2015, with satellite locations at Google offices in New York City, Buenos Aires, and London. The same agenda will be repeated in Singapore on January 21, 2015, with satellite locations at Google offices in Bangalore, Tokyo, Taipei, and Shanghai. The company also released a video showing off the first prototype from Project Ara. Until now, all we've seen so far are industrial design models. This one actually boots up.

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[binarylarry]

You truly bring us the truth, my brother. Creativity and innovation are unsustainable!

Just buy whats popular and remember to OBEY!

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[Tumbleweed]

The desktop computer I've been upgrading bit by bit begs to disagree with you. As do my interchangeable lens cameras.

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[drinkypoo]

For everyone of you, there's 500 of me. People who just buy a PC and use it.

The ones who buy AMD are convenient to the rest of us because when they cast off their old machine, we'll be able to upgrade it since AMD rides a socket for a long time. It's expensive to go to a new socket, Intel has buckets of money. And also, they tend to have lots of memory bandwidth, so I don't care if I can't upgrade to the new shiny shiny. You just have to get in there before the old memory gets expensive.

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[DuckDodgers]

I have a PC in the house with an AMD X2 4200+ processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD as the primary hard drive. It runs Windows 7, Firefox, Chrome, a basic photo editor, and Minecraft just fine. It boots in under 20 seconds. Most of the components are 8 years old.

By contrast, a modern smart phone is lucky to provide two years of service before something critical to operation (microphone, speakers, screen) breaks, or it's too slow to keep up with increasingly heavyweight newer versions of Android, or

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[TheRaven64]

I used to think desktop computers were upgradable, but it's not really true. Sure, you can bump the RAM and the disk easily, but by the time a new CPU is worth the bother, the socket and chipset have changed, so you need to buy a new motherboard. The new motherboard takes a different kind of RAM. The hard disk might still work if you're lucky (although you may find that the interface type has changed) but it's probably going to be the bottleneck in the new system so you probably want to upgrade it too.

T

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[binarylarry]

The hard disk might still work if you're lucky

LOLOLOLOL :P

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[DuckDodgers]

The trick is getting a PC with a dedicated PCI-Express x8 or x16 slot that has room in the case to hold a dedicated video card, and can hold at least 8GB of RAM. It doesn't need 8GB when you get it, just make sure the option is there. You also don't need a dedicated video card in the PCI-Express x8 or x16 slot when you buy the machine, just the option to get one. Onboard video cards are fine to start.

Upgrade 1: increase the available RAM. 8GB is good, more won't hurt but probably doesn't help unless yo

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[TheRaven64]

To address each of your points in turn:

8GB is RAM was the minimum I was buying 4 years ago. Back then, it was because it was the sweet spot in price per GB. Unfortunately, in some machines it was the most that the board could support and so is now the thing making me ponder replacing the motherboards. Specifically, on my NAS box, because increasing the disks will increase the size of the deduplication tables, meaning that I'll need to increase the size of the RAM to get tolerable performance, meaning I'

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[DuckDodgers]

Okay, you're buying much higher end machines than I am, and you do less gaming than my kids do. So you're right, you don't get any room to upgrade.

I buy mid to low range parts, and then the upgrade options are excellent and I get six to eight years out of every machine. My wild guess is that the same thing will hold for modular smart phones - buy top end, and you've got to replace the whole thing to upgrade. Buy mid range or low range but based on the most modern core architecture, and you can get a

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[swb]

There's all kinds of reasons this won't work, but I'm glad someone disagrees and is spending time developing it anyway because it seems like a cool concept and the idea of a modular phone/phablet/tablet/laptop/desktop system is appealing.

I think a lot of components are rapidly approaching the point where they're good enough for most people -- how many more ppi is Joe Sixpack going to want once a phone is over 300 ppi?

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[CastrTroy]

I think the problem is that because this is so much different from the other phones on the market, the price will end up being high. So the people with real concerns about the cost of upgrades won't be able to afford it. The people who will be able to afford it are the people who will go out and buy the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy every year. They have they money to get the newest phone all the time, and upgrading isn't an issue. This isn't going to help the person who buys a Moto G for $180 and uses

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[swb]

I think some of the technology issues involving size, etc. will eventually get fixed. The price may actually end up being less if the value proposition includes using modules in multiple devices, desktops, etc.

The software issue is two-pronged -- one, hardware advances so rapidly right now that I mostly give OEMs a break for bad support of older devices (maybe more nods to Apple, less to Android).

The biggest obstacle for both software and an Ara-like system with modularity is the economics of monolithic de

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[DuckDodgers]

Right. This is an attempt to commodotize smart phones much further than they already are. The big manufacturers will hate it, because it will drive their profit margins down to nothing. But if it gets enough momentum, they'll have no choice but to get involved. At launch these phones will probably be more expensive than competing monolithic devices. But in five years, maybe a $300 off-contract componentized Android phone will crush an iPhone 9 on specs.

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[CastrTroy]

Possibly. But in 5 years, I fully expect a phone that does everything I want a phone to do to cost $100 or less. $300 isn't that cheap for a phone. Sure it's cheaper than a $700 iPhone, but it's still quite high. I don't see the Apple being able to ask $700 for the latest iPhone in 5 years and maintain the level of sales they are used to. There's only so much you can do on a 5 inch phone, especially when they try to make it so thin. If there's a 5 inch device selling for $700 in 5 years, it had better ha

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[DuckDodgers]

I don't know about a full desktop operating system - but it might have one - but what if it's got a 3GHz 64-bit octa-core processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, 3 days between charges, a 4K screen, speakers that don't suck and can be heard 30 feet away, and (maybe most of all in the eyes of the average consumer) an 80MP camera?

I think the Samsung Galaxy S3 and equivalent competing hardware hit a point where Android was fast enough in day to day use to not be annoying and the pictures were decent. So i

good

[NotInHere]

finally I can run a headless phone.

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[Tumbleweed]

finally I can run a headless phone.

It doesn't even have to be a phone. :)

A Theif's Dream Come True

[Jane Q. Public]

Imagine... a phone you can steal tiny little parts out of, rather than the whole phone. It might be minutes or even hours before anybody even notices.

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[Jane Q. Public]

Crap. I can spell "thief". Really I can.

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[davester666]

You'll notice. The thief won't bother with first launching the configuration app and turn off the module before removing it, so your phone will crash.

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[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Imagine... a phone you can steal tiny little parts out of, rather than the whole phone. It might be minutes or even hours before anybody even notices.

Are you serious? You think your little armchairy-10-seconds-of-analysis thought on the security of this device hasn't been covered by google's team of engineers?

Oh, it has [extremetech.com]:

Google says that there will be a “manager” app on the smartphone that controls some kind of locking mechanism, which keeps the modules from popping out when the phone is dropped

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[Jane Q. Public]

You and Davester666 missed my whole point.

If you set your phone down next to you in some public place, you'll see it sitting there and everything is fine.

But somebody could have stolen a module from the side that isn't visible. Sure, you'll notice when you pick it up, I don't dispute that.

Of course, you probably shouldn't set your phone down like that. But people do.

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[compro01]

They did learn. These things aren't clipped together. They're held together with electropermanent magnets.

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[gweilo8888]

Awesome, so your phone can wipe your credit cards and (more likely, because they have a lower coercivity) hotel room keys. What a feature!

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[zenith1111]

Mobile phones have very powerful magnets in their speakers and they don't usually cause problems like that, do they? Maybe they have very good mu-metal shields in the sepakers.

That is valid concern but, as far as I know, magnetic cards are mostly being replaced with smartcards or RFID, that might not be an issue in a couple of years. I've not used the magnetic stripes in my cards in a long time, the ICs are so cheap and functional that using smartcards or RFID instead of magnetic stripe is a no-brainer i

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[ArmoredDragon]

I remember those exploding Nokia phones. I think that was probably Nokia's best design ever. Not for practical reasons, but every time it happened it made you and everybody else sure that your phone was ruined, only nothing bad ever happened to it, and all of the witnesses were reminded of the Nokia brand in spectacular fashion.

only for nerds

[ezakimak]

No one in the mass market will buy this. So many already can hardly handle a one-piece phone/tablet/laptop/computer/device. Women will not buy it simply because it's ugly.

"Oh, but you can upgrade the camera" you say? Anyone that is so much into photography that they need a better camera will buy...... a *real camera*. You know, with interchangeable, actual high-quality, purposeful lenses.

"Oh, but you can just upgrade the screen or processor" you say? Prediction: the upgrade path for any generation chassis w

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[TheRaven64]

I did this for my NAS, but it was more expensive than an HP microserver with a similar form factor. The only reason that I did it was that I wanted to be able to use the machine for XBMC so I wanted a slightly better GPU. The only bit that I'm likely to upgrade is the disks, and even then I had to make some compromises (the case has 4 removable disk bays and a slimline optical drive bay, but I couldn't find a motherboard that had everything I wanted and more than 4 SATA slots, so I can't use one of the di

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[gweilo8888]

For a phone, I agree modularity (other than the battery) is a bad idea. For a desktop or notebook PC, I couldn't disagree more.

The ability to upgrade my machines isn't there for adding stuff willy-nilly every six months. It is there for adding stuff when I *need* to, and allowing me to choose what best fits my needs in the first place. My desktop PC will last me five years easily (it is already more than three years old and still far more powerful than I need for current games, applications like high-defi

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[gweilo8888]

Now, doing this for laptops... that's the real question--why haven't they done this *yet*. (And no, just because you can aggravatingly, pain-stakingly pry open a laptop to service it and in some cases interchange some parts does not qualify).

They have done it -- you just have to pay enterprise pricing if you want this feature. Look at HP's ZBook series for one example. Slide one latch and the entire bottom pops off, revealing the hard drive bay, DIMM sockets, mSATA slot and wireless LAN card without remo

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[drinkypoo]

They have done it -- you just have to pay enterprise pricing if you want this feature. Look at HP's ZBook series for one example. Slide one latch and the entire bottom pops off, revealing the hard drive bay, DIMM sockets, mSATA slot and wireless LAN card without removing a single screw.

Can you actually, meaningfully swap the GPU yet? Most of the time there are fitment and cooler issues. And I note you didn't list the CPU socket. Most of my laptops for years have had socketed CPUs.

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[Miamicanes]

In theory, the answer is a qualified "maybe". Most new laptop discrete video cards connect via mini-PCIe, and I believe there's some anecdotal degree of physical compatibility between Alienware/Dell and someone else (Clevo, I think). As a practical matter, if you you're talking about buying a better video card on eBay that was explicitly designed for your exact model (say, upgrading from the cheapest ATI card to the best Quadro), you'll probably be OK. Everything else is a crapshoot.

Apparently, screw holes

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[dixonpete]

I have a Galaxy S sitting in my closet that's perfectly functional save for a loose USB power connector. Without that connector the phone is crippled to the point of being useless. Repairing it would cost more than the phone is worth. Multiply that by 10's of millions of phones per year falling into the same in the same state across North America. That's just wrong.

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[pushing-robot]

I hate to break it to you, but even if it had a working power plug a Galaxy S would be crippled to the point of useless today. Smartphones have been improving fast...really fast. That phone is somewhere less than 5% as fast as today's models, equivalent to a very early P4 in PC terms. I'd be very surprised if many modern apps and web sites worked acceptably on it. And if you don't care about those, get a dirt cheap dumb phone with better battery life.

PCs have been 'fast enough' for a while, at least when co

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[drinkypoo]

Repairing it would cost more than the phone is worth.

Having it repaired, sure. But this is news for nerds. Can't you fix it yourself for a few bucks?

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[pushing-robot]

I can't imagine this will see serious adoption in its current form.

On the other hand, I can see this leading to phone designs with one, two, or a strip of small replaceable I/O modules along an edge, for people who want custom addons or this year's new $feature without carrying around adapters or replacing their phone.

People might want a camera with a bit of optical zoom, or a MicroSD card reader, or a bigger speaker, or for this crowd even an XJACK-type pop-out ethernet jack.

By constraining expansi

Re:only for nerds

[c]

No one in the mass market will buy this.

Nonsense. You just haven't been paying attention. The market is already buying modular phones. It's just that the modularity sucks, hard.

What do you think those battery cases are? MHL/OTG dongles? Just modules with extra ports. iPhone camera lenses? Infrared camera adapters? Pressy (extra hardware button that fits in the headphone jack)? Dimple (stick on NFC-based hardware buttons)? Wireless charging plates that fit in behind the battery and plug into the USB port?

Want

[rrohbeck]

Assuming there will be a mSATA slot available (to plug in a 1TB SSD) and a PCIe interconnect to do SMP with the 32-core 64-bit ARM system I see in my future. And to drive an external GPU for the big-ass display of course.

Soundtrack? Really?

[stinkbomb]

Why on earth does every video have a soundtrack? I find it extremely distracting from the presentation to have music playing, but this isn't even in the background; it dominates my attention I really believe that having so much music omnipresent in our daily lives diminishes the value that we place on music. And it distracts me from the message the video is really trying to convey: what do you want me to pay attention to; the content or the music? Sorry, I'm too dumb to pay attention to both.

Link to the video

[3dr]

Dear submitter, if you want to include text that says "they have released a video, here's the link" then link to the video, not some ad-laden secondary site.

The video is on youtube, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Seems to have a lot of negative comments...

[ericbrow]

And I'm not saying any of them are wrong. But I'm also thinking of the potential of what these could do. Infrared camera module, blood-sugar testing module are two things that come to my mind.