A Day with Project Ara, Google's Modular Phone
Project Ara is a cool concept but very vaporware-y. I don't think it will ever come to market as a general release consumer product.<p>I have three distinct reasons for this belief:<p>- Current gen' cellphones are extremely dense internally. There is no empty space, a Project Ara phone needs room for connectors, housing, and similar. Where does this space come from? The battery?<p>- Either the components will be tightly coupled in which case you'll lose the primarily benefit (interchangeable components) or loosely coupled in which case you'll lose performance (as data is transitioned in and out of generic interfaces).<p>- The connectors can never be "good enough." With the phone heating and cooling (environmentally or from internal sources) and the phone getting knocked around/bent/etc you'll see components disconnect from one another and the thing crash, a lot.<p>The Project Ara project might generate some cool concepts which they can go forward with, a lot of cool ideas come from other failed ideas. But as a whole concept where you can slide in and out components and it somehow doesn't increase the size, weight, or decrease reliability or battery life just seems like a pipe dream (baring any massive improvement in battery technology).<p>I genuinely hope they succeed and I'd buy a Project Ara phone if they can engineer something remotely palatable, however the engineering challenges on this one just seem too high to overcome.<p>PS - I didn't even touch on the software issues and some of the chick-egg problems relating to this (e.g. are they going to have a pre-Android OS run who's only job is to reconfigure Android for the hardware changes?).<p>PPS - This negativity has nothing to do with the recent demo crashes. That happens during development, it is normal. I am more concerned about the technological challenges they face and if they're over-come-able at all.