Motorola Project Ara

Dear Emma,

Call me slow in tech, but I only heard about this Project Ara + Phonebloks concept yesterday. Incase ur also slow in tech like me, Project Ara + Phonebloks is a rather innovate idea to make our current smartphone from this

to this

Personally this concept of lego smartphone rings a bell for me since I'm a Javammer. You see, in software design we design our software to be modular and flexible so we swap/change a part of the code without impacting the whole system. This is done with usually via a well thought of interfaces and sometimes with the aid of the framework we're leveraging to build our system on. By breaking down a system into smaller chunks of parts by functionality, we end up with tiny components which focus on doing something well. Having such tiny components tend to make it easier reuse, replace, and test.

By designing a smartphone the same way, we get the same benefits as well. Imagine having a camera component we can swap once the market releases a newer model without changing the entire phone. Want more RAM, just replace the RAM component with another higher RAM component available. Spoiled display? Just buy a new display component and replace just that in your phone. A lot of interesting implications...

The idea is quite similar like our desktop computer was design upon, which bring me to the possible challenges this concept would face. It's the same problem as our desktop computer, the component we can swap/replace in our computer is bound by the motherboard. Say my motherboard only has a DDR RAM slot, I can't just replace my RAM with a DDR3 RAM since the slot physically is different to begin with. So why do DDR and DDR3 RAM requires a different slot? Simple, innovation in design of a better RAM.

The crucial area in the workability of this modular smartphone lies at the motherboard of this smartphone and how it's not only going to allow attachment of different types of component but as well as how it's going to manage newer model of this components which might physically require different physical shapes and sizes. What if one day, we found a more efficient design for the smartphone motherboard itself, can our old components be use in the new motherboard? If not, we're gonna go down the same route as our desktop as well, and this modular smartphone is only modular for a couple of years.

Since we got some mad geniuses in google and motorola, I do hope they are able to find a fix for this issue as oppose to simply following the same path as our desktop. However, I'm not so optimistic on this as from the perspective of sales, the only way they can sell us more is if our phone becomes obsolete.