Project Ara Smartphone Developer Kits Available for Preorder

Project Ara – Google’s modular smartphone. You may have heard this name being excitedly thrown around. With no ETA on arrival or information on when (or even if) developer kits will ever become available, actual news on Googles Project has been very limited until now. Modular smartphones are an brilliant concept and it really is a wonder why this hasn’t really been done already… fortunately we shouldn’t have to wait too much longer; Google is now taking orders for the Project Ara smartphone developer kits even though the phone is not expected to available to the general public until sometime next year.

The concept behind Project Ara is that the user can create a phone perfect for their own personal needs and to the exact spec that they want. In addition this, this should mean that you can just keep upgrading the phone’s components and not ever need a brand new phone – seems like a completely alien prospect to us when we’re all used to getting a nice new phone at least every 24 months.

The pre-release kits will allow hardware developers to cross-test and develop components and even create the components via 3D printing. As an added bonus, developers will be able to enter the Project Ara Developer Prize Challenge – the winner being able to claim a sizable $100000 prize for the best fully-functioning module. This competition ends on the 30^th September – only 6 weeks after the 2^nd run of developer kits.

The 1^st developer kits will be shipped before the beginning of August so that gives little time to perfect your functioning modular creation.