Bored with having the same phone as other people? Motorola hears you, and it wants to launch a modular smartphone with interchangeable parts which can be customised by the user.
The company announced Project Ara via its blog late yesterday, a project which in its own words aims to develop “a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.” The company continued to explain its vision;
“We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.”
Moto has recently been exploring the customisable phone avenue heavily, touring the US with a team dubbed MAKEwithMOTO for the past year in a special truck which it oddly named ‘Sticky’ which is covered entirely in Velcro (don’t ask us why). Inside Sticky was a bounty of hackable Motorola smartphones and 3D printing gear, allowing developers and other clever folk to explore the world of creating customised products.
The company has of course also launched the Moto X; a highly customisable flagship smartphone which can be designed online by the buyer and then made to their specification in the US before being delivered to the door. Moto offers a range of colour and finish options for every exterior part of the Moto X, including an engraving option for the back.
Now it has revealed plans to make the smartphone even more customisable, though Moto hasn’t yet revealed precisely how it aims to do so. A couple of images posted on the blog show what it could be like: a phone made up of cubes and an array of interchangeable parts which all slot together to create one phone.
A developer kit for Project Ara looks set to launch before the end of the year, giving developers the chance to submit modules which could end up being used in a real phone made by Moto.
Project Ara looks to be an intriguing project, that’s for sure, and we’re all for pushing the boundaries to bring new ideas to the gadget world. We’ve no idea just how something like this would work, but it’s already evoking fond memories of the days where we could customise just about everything about our Nokia 3310s and we love it for that.
