Project Ara Update: It's Still On the Way, Sooner Than You Think
Project Ara, the modular smartphone concept that gained a lot of attention last year, seemed to fall by the wayside of Google's ambitions in recent months. Now it looks like Ara just got fast-tracked.
Google's Project Ara is quite an experimental idea, but not exactly a long-term "moonshot" dream. But after a quiet spell, and some unforeseen factors that prevented a scheduled trial run, it looked like Ara had died -- or at least was in hibernation.
Not so, according to Wired, which reported on Friday that indeed, "Project Ara Lives." And it's coming to developers by the Fall of 2016, and is expected to hit the market in a consumer edition sometime next year.
What is Project Ara?
Ara is the idea that a modular smartphone could allow consumers to customize their smartphones' hardware by choosing exactly what components suit them the best.
So shutterbugs would spend more money on their camera sensors and storage, but wouldn't need a processor package as powerful as a mobile gaming enthusiast, for example. Heavy phone talkers might not care so much about high-resolution displays, but would invest more in bigger batteries. People who read books on their smartphone might even prefer an E-Ink display over an AMOLED.
Project Ara's modular smartphone allows this flexibility by providing an "endoskeleton," or a baseplate framework onto which different hardware modules snap on, including display, memory, camera, and processor.
What's even better than customizing your smartphone at purchase (Motorola does this to some extent already) is that if you outgrow one part or another -- perhaps you need more memory or are tired of the 13-megapixel camera you originally got -- you can upgrade your modular smartphone without having to buy an entirely new device. In fact, if you want an E-Ink screen for reading on a plane trip but otherwise use a high-resolution display for gaming, you can hot swap those parts out on the go.
Ara Hits a Snag
The project seemed to be moving along smoothly and was scheduled for a trial consumer run in Puerto Rico, due to the island's special regulatory and cultural situation as a territory but also as a base of American Latino consumers -- and as LatinPost has previously reported, U.S. Latinos are particularly prone to pick up on new trends in smartphones.
Then Puerto Rico's economy collapsed in a debt crisis, and Google canceled the consumer trial run.
Ara Lives
After a long period of silence, Google announced on the last day of its I/O 2016 developers convention that Project Ara was still alive, and indeed was shipping to developers this fall. The consumer version, according to TheVerge, should be ready sometime in 2017.
There are some changes in Ara from the pie-in-the-sky full modular design that Google was working with during its initial developments.
For now, the upcoming developer kit for Project Ara will include the main 'phone' kit -- once thought to be separated out into modules -- as part of the baseplate. That means that in this early generation version, at least, the battery, CPU, and display won't be swappable.
In the on-stage Google I/O 2016 demonstration, though, camera modules were hot swappable without needing a phone reboot, and swapping even worked through an "Okay Google, eject the camera" voice command.
Of course, the very nature of Ara means that the first device is going to be limited, but an entire ecosystem of swappable components could be spurred into existence after it catches on. Hopefully, it catches on.
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