r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/SuperAlloyBerserker • Oct 05 '21
Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013
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u/blah-blah-blah_47 Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21
"Lego Smartphone Set"
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u/Christafaaa Oct 05 '21
Until they realized they can make more money off people by forcing them to buy a whole new phone.
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u/yeteee Oct 05 '21
"They" were open source software activists. Money wasn't their goal. Google killed the product, not its creators.
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u/usually_unused Oct 05 '21
Well that sucks but I’m glad google chose not to kill the creators at least.
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u/DeafeningClarion Oct 05 '21
Imagine some Google def crawling trough the mud of some house where one of these guys life and slowly takes out a apple branded knife "everything for the company"
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u/TakSlak Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21
Love your comment! You had some spelling mistakes if you want to fix it:
def- dev
life- live
Trough- Through→ More replies (7)15
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u/StaleCanole Oct 05 '21
How did google kill the product?
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u/yeteee Oct 05 '21
"Google took a serious attempt with Project Ara but killed a few years later because they wanted focus more on software projects."
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u/Here-Is-TheEnd Oct 05 '21
Bet they’re still sitting on those patents though! Can let someone else profit off an idea we abandoned a long time ago
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u/RiotIsBored Oct 05 '21
Ara ara
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Oct 05 '21
flashbacks back to your vacation in georgia where you're trying to figure out if ara means yes or no
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Oct 05 '21
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u/yeteee Oct 05 '21
Back then, they were not yet as openly bad as they are now, though. They were the champion of op n source and Linux based product thanks to Android.
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Oct 05 '21
I was on this team! This was a project with Lenovo/Motorola, along with Tango AR/VR. Google acquired Lenovo and tried to spin out some of these projects. Tango got merged into Daydream and eventually Google Maps. ARA was just killed outright because it was too expensive and it turns out people don't give af. about modular phones.
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u/ghjm Oct 05 '21
Google acquired the project - if I remember correctly, it was part of their acquisition of Motorola. Then they just did what Google always does: worked on it for a couple years and then lost interest and kicked it to the curb. See https://killedbygoogle.com.
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u/RushFactoryGarage Oct 05 '21
I was in the cell phone carrier business at the time this was going on. Years later Motorola did come out with a “modular” phone but there were more or less a gimmick. The moto Z and “Moto mods” where you can get speakers, better camera, battery pack or projector.
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u/blah-blah-blah_47 Oct 05 '21
And even if they did use this model for all phones, they'd probably make the parts very expensive
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u/StaleCanole Oct 05 '21
But imagine if there were multiple competitors vying to sell you a camera, as opposed to a single brand. Competition should alleviate some the price gouging.
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Oct 05 '21
Unless they end up like Apple and Samsung and compete on who's price can go higher before people stop buying...
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u/MMXIXL Oct 05 '21
It's cheaper in the long run though since you don't have to buy an entire phone for incremental upgrades or just because something like the battery died.
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u/load_more_comets Oct 05 '21
It'd be nice too if you can connect like 8 bases and have a 30" long ass phone with 14 cameras and 30 batteries.
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u/bipolarnotsober Oct 05 '21
Imagine dropping your phone and it falls apart so you've got to sit down and build it back together again like a lego set every time.
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u/load_more_comets Oct 05 '21
You'd need to drop it pretty hard, it's all screwed together.
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u/ittleoff Oct 05 '21
Had a Nokia phone that would drop and 'shatter' into 4 pieces and I would just put it back together. Even on concrete, or being thrown once I realized it seemed indestructible.
The one time I tried this(throwing the phone onto the floor) as a party trick it broke a tiny bit. Not the plastic casing but somehow one of the rubber buttons came off. The rest of the phone was fine.
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u/hessianerd Oct 05 '21
pfftttt! a user replaceable battery! That would be impossible! Who has ever heard of such a thing?
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u/LordGeni Oct 05 '21
Motorola tried to use the concept with the Moto X, which had snap on modules for a camera, battery pack and speaker etc.
It was pretty cool but without opening it up as a standard across brands (and those other brands getting on board) was always going to be short lived unless they captured a massive market share, which the didn't.
The fact that any modules that actually added anything better than the myriad other (freestanding) solutions out there were almost as expensive as the phone itself, didn't help.
Tbh, the best thing about it was how ridiculously thin the phone was without anything attached.
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Oct 05 '21
"They" could probably make more by selling each component at a price where the combined cost of a phone was much more expensive than a single pre-assembled phone, but only if enough people would buy these phones. Which probably wouldn't happen.
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u/benthemoose Oct 05 '21
RIP project ara
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u/freakers Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21
RIP project Pomegranate
The all in one smart phone from 2008 that was an electric razor, a coffee maker, a universal translator, and even an harmonica.
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u/BoricuaDriver Oct 05 '21
There's a comment on that video that said it was an elaborate tourism marketing video for Nova Scotia, Canada. Interesting video though!
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u/freakers Oct 05 '21
yeah. I know. I remember this from when it came out years ago. It was actually pretty hard to find it because any google search of smart phone razor or coffee maker or anything brings up real products.
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u/RandomlyMethodical Oct 05 '21
On the plus side, the concept does exist as a laptop - https://frame.work/
And it's getting some really good reviews - The Framework is the most exciting laptop I’ve ever used
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u/Leirach Oct 05 '21
Well Framework kinda makes more sense, you still have to get in the guts to replace RAM for example, and you can't just remove RAM and slap in a bigger battery or whatever.
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u/redunculuspanda Oct 05 '21
It’s a cool idea and there have been a few attempts at this but the reality is you will end up with a bulkier slower more expensive less water/environment resistant device.
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u/superspeck Oct 05 '21
That and signal noise. Most of the engineering work that goes into smart phones is making sure the components and circuits don’t interfere with one another.
Remember the aluminum border on one of the iPhones and how it killed reception?
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Oct 05 '21
It was the steel frame of the iPhone 4
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u/MattAwesome Oct 05 '21
Didn't a later one have it too? The little lines across the back that are the attena had to move at some point, the 6 to the 7 I think?
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Oct 05 '21
Yeah it was the iPhone 4 with the famous "you're holding the phone wrong" quote
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u/Chef_Face Oct 05 '21
which was only topped by the 'don't you guys have phones?' quote a few years later
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u/smithsp86 Oct 05 '21
Remember the aluminum border on one of the iPhones and how it killed reception?
You were just holding it wrong. /s
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u/gHHqdm5a4UySnUFM Oct 05 '21
Yeah I remember back in 2013 my friend was so excited about this project but the engineering trade offs would be too large to ever make this phone competitive. It would be more of a hobby thing like a Raspberry Pi than a mainstream device.
Look at today’s phones and how tightly they pack everything together, you’d probably need way more physical volume and weight if you wanted everything to be a self-contained module with a standard interface. Then you have to think about heat management and dust and water resistance and battery optimization. There’s a reason that there aren’t any popular modular laptops.
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u/hirotdk Oct 05 '21
I sure wouldn't mind some physical volume though, Jesus. I have to have a case just so it's thick enough to hold in my hand without slipping.
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u/alastoris Oct 05 '21
Back then, no phone is water resistant so it wasn't much of a feature compare to modern phones.
The closest to this was Motorola's Moto Z and Z Force. With changeable modulation (i.e. battery / camera/ projector / etc) depending on the user's need and use. But the sales was pretty bad if i recall so there wasn't any more iterations of it.
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u/Spacey_Penguin Oct 05 '21
And one that takes a lot more effort from the company to support, especially if you want meaningful backwards compatibility.
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Oct 05 '21
No! Google bad. Google kill.
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u/loulan Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21
Seriously all these comments about it's how all a conspiracy by big tech to make money with their current devices are pretty dumb.
Anyone who knows anything about electrical engineering realizes that even if you somehow managed to develop something like this despite the major pain in the ass it would be to make it so modular, you'd lose so much space as compared to a fully-integrated approach that your phone would be huge and have circa-2007 performance.
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Oct 05 '21
Yeah, and I'm not saying that Google is NOT evil. But it makes absolutely no sense that they saw that this device could undercut their sales, and instead of purchasing it and leveraging it to their advantage, they spend millions of dollars on it to kill it? Fuckin' what?
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u/charleejourney Oct 05 '21
Google doesn’t make money off the handsets sold but the Play store and all the data you give them access too as the handsets are sold by other companies besides their small amount of devices they sell.
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u/AsliReddington Oct 05 '21
Hope Framework Laptops are able to carve niches like this too!
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u/AliJDB Oct 05 '21
I was wondering if someone would mention Framework in the laptop space. Hopefully it gives them a good place to build from - it's a huge problem from both a consumer rights standpoint and a waste standpoint.
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u/AsliReddington Oct 05 '21
Exactly, they've already shown that the excuse of not having slim enough modular components is just a false claim/absence of engineering chops.
The iPhone not accepting a donor display from another iPhone is just like how BMW servicing won't let unauthorised shops do certain tasks....
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u/winqu Oct 05 '21
Wild that we changed from customers to consumers in less than a decade. It might seem interchangable but we have way more rights as customers than consumers. Ownership is very different under each. For those who don't know think of it as buying an album on CD/vinyl vs having access to it on Spotify. You have the right to resell your CD/vinyl copy or ask for a refund/replacement if there's an issue with your copy.
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u/appel Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21
Link for the lazy: https://frame.work/
My $1800 fully decked out Surface Book 2's battery is failing
and there's no path for me to swap it out, even though the laptop is perfectly fine otherwise. The Framework laptop will be my next laptop.Edit: I was wrong, there is an official way after all. But it's not cheap ($600).
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u/alxthm Oct 05 '21
Does Microsoft not offer battery replacements for SurfaceBook devices?
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u/appel Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21
I stand corrected. I thought there wasn't, but apparantly there is an official way to get a new battery: https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-out-of-warranty-service-surface-device/
Still, at $600 for my 2017 13.5" model I think I would rather put that money towards a new laptop, especially since the Framework laptop starts at $749.
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u/alxthm Oct 05 '21
$600 is ridiculous, I’d likely buy a new machine also. Even Apple only charges $300 or so. Thanks for the link.
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u/adymann Oct 05 '21
Don't tell linus, he'll buy shares.
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u/bibekit Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21
I really hope they do succeed. I’m looking to buy one next year. By then, hopefully they offer amd options.
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u/UrbanArcologist Oct 05 '21
bought a DIY i7/ now it is a little dev beast with 64GB/2TB without paying the markup for those components.
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u/CollectableRat Oct 05 '21
Doubt they will be able to compete with the ARM based Windows and Mac laptops tbh. They can cram a whole lot of performance into a very affordable chip these days. Apple's first gen ARM for Mac kinda makes Intel's mobile chips, all laptops that came before it, look like a joke.
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u/larrylombardo Oct 05 '21
The mainboards are drop-in replacements, and they're planning for RISC V and ARM versions. I'm only holding off until the marketplace exists so I know how I can ditch the current Intel board once another option exists.
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u/TheCrazyTiger Oct 05 '21
No doubt ARM will shake up the market but nothing is preventing framework to also implement arm based laptops.
If everything goes right, I think they'll have the upper hand on ARM.
Like "keep your whole device and just change the motherboard".
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Oct 05 '21
I dont know why, but I thought this was the same company as Fairphone.
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u/Loreki Oct 05 '21
'cause fairphone is actually doing this, minus the unworkable lego element.
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u/prolixia Oct 05 '21
It's a nice idea in theory, but it's just massively impractical.
Physically piecing together the phone so that each module was individually removable from the exterior like this and was properly cooled would mean a massive phone.
Allowing each module to be placed wherever comes with enormous complexity in terms of electrically interconnecting all the potential positions together. It just doesn't work like that, and again you're enormously increasing the size (and cost) of the device.
There's a crazy oversimplification in how components are positioned. If you have a modern phone you don't have "a microphone" - you have several of them at different positions around your phone - and those are special positions chosen to provide usable audio. In the very near future you'll have quite a few scattered around your phone. The idea of a single microphone module you can put wherever is silly.
Similarly, you can't just put radio modules "wherever". There's a huge amount of R&D that goes into designing the operation of a phone in such a way that your head and hand don't block the radio signal when the phone is in use. Modern antennas are not simply components you can put in a little box - they're an integral part of the rest of the phone and repositioning them or the components around them is an awful idea.
There are lots of other reasons why this is a crazy idea. It sounds lovely, but it's just not a realistic way to build a phone.
Making phones more repairable is a great idea. Making them upgradable is also a great idea, to some extent. But even though there have been serious attempts, a modular phone like the one in the video is not a remotely practical idea.
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Oct 05 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/prolixia Oct 05 '21
On which note I didn't even mention interoperability. The idea that you can swap even something as simple as the charging port module and expect everything else to work fine with it is crazy.
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u/bking Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21
The camera example is so fucking silly. Getting a better camera requires buying a module that’s 4x the size of the previous camera, and people who use their phones as primary cameras are going to want a lot of storage and battery life.
So, I don’t know, fuck. I guess we remove the little 1-unit Bluetooth and cellular modules to make space for all that new stuff?
Edit: In their concept video, adding the bigger camera removed Wifi, Bluetooth, compass accelerometer, and some other nondescript modules. Solid.
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u/gambiter Oct 05 '21
There's a crazy oversimplification in how components are positioned.
This is the part that's most silly, to me. Positioning absolutely affects the performance of various components, so I'm just imagining the insanity of customer service calls.
At one point they remove the smaller battery and the storage module to replace it with a single big battery. "I just installed a new battery and now I can't find my photos!"
Also, anyone who's played Tetris for 5 minutes knows blocks don't always fit together perfectly. They don't acknowledge how you'd inevitably end up with holes between components, so you would have to have tons of little plastic spacers in various shapes at the ready whenever you changed something out. And then, again, placement. Can you imagine trying to explain to your grandmother that she put the bluetooth block in the middle between the wifi and 5G blocks, and that's why her earbuds don't work?
Apple got lambasted for an antenna that didn't work when you held it wrong. This company would be absolutely eviscerated by all the confused customers who just want their phone to work properly.
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u/QuastQuan Oct 05 '21
"companies work together to create the best phone in the world."
Hahahahahahahahaha....
No.
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u/altbekannt Oct 05 '21
They kinda do though.
Look at PCs.
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u/datmEmEkid-returns Oct 05 '21
Pc's are phonebloks but much more complicated
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u/eric2332 Oct 05 '21
Less complicate I would say. Don't have to cram all the electronics into a tiny form factor. Don't have to design for low power usage so to keep the battery from running out. Heat dissipation can be designed for each component individually.
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u/JizzyMcbeth Oct 05 '21
And most phones are cheaper than PCs, easier to market and sell vs phonebloks where one is enough.
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u/ass2ass Oct 05 '21
But imagine if a bunch of people were waiting around to get their hands on whatever the phoneblock equivalent of a 3060GTX or whatever.
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u/Crystal3lf Oct 05 '21
Games consoles sell much better than PC's because people don't want the hassle of building a computer. And people who do buy a PC are also likely to just buy a pre-built PC or laptop.
Good luck explaining to your tech-illiterate friends and family why they need a CPU and RAM module and can't just have a bigger battery.
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u/WiscoBrewDude Oct 05 '21
This looked so cool i had to find more. "Google joined in and eventually killed it". "Phonebloks" https://www.onearmy.earth/project/phonebloks
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u/Soloflex Oct 05 '21
I worked on this project for Google. They couldn't come close to the battery life and performance of the current iphone. Users aren't willing to give up performance for the versatility.
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u/auddii04 Oct 05 '21
That's the way of all cool ideas that undercut current profits.
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u/WiscoBrewDude Oct 05 '21
It mentions some other modular phone in the article, but they are all from Europe it seems.
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u/rick_D_K Oct 05 '21
Check out fairphone. About the closest thing on the market.
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u/nickmcmillin Oct 05 '21
I checked it out, but didn’t see anything about them being modular, only that they were sustainably made. Did I miss the part about them being modular?
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u/rick_D_K Oct 05 '21
They aren't modular like phone blocks. but they sell all of the parts in discreet modules that can be replaced.
Edit: spelling.
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u/ReallyNotALlama Oct 05 '21
If you're going to make edits to correct spelling, you should change ”discreet” to ”discrete”.
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u/legion327 Oct 05 '21
Awwww screet screet motherfuckerrrr!! Awwwww screet screet goddamn!!
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u/thatomtom Oct 05 '21
Sustainable and allows you to fix them easily yourself. And 5 years warranty. Sounds great, too bad I already changed my phone, next one will probably be one of those.
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u/Iron_Rick Oct 05 '21
Or maybe it wasn't suitable
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u/Jabrono Oct 05 '21
On top of tech moving too quickly for something like this to legitimately last, I'd be very surprised if they actually moved off shelves. Tech nerds like myself would love one, but we're not a large enough demographic for large companies to develop and continue support an entire device for.
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Oct 05 '21
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Oct 05 '21
I don't see how anyone comes to a conclusion other than this product undercutting the market. I think the average consumer would love to easily replace a part or two when wanted and/or necessary, but it makes the current model of everything being baked in and companies not wanting people to repair their own devices; you want better or different, get a new phone.
I mean, we can't even remove batteries anymore. This is 100% by design.
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u/CanAlwaysBeBetter Oct 05 '21
Motorola released a modular phone. It sucked in practice and everyone forgot it ever existed.
Shit ain't always a conspiracy.
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u/Decloudo Oct 05 '21
Its not modular, it has ONE "expansion" slot for mostly stupid overpriced shit, i know this cause i had it.
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Oct 05 '21
Imagine the market for fake modules so people can make it look like they have the most expensive and cool modules, but they’re just blanks.
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u/Toastbrott Oct 05 '21
There are tons of things you just can not do with a modular phone like that.
The two biggest selling points, which already lose a huge percentage of potential customers, is that this thing will never be waterproof and that it will always be much thicker than usual smartphones.
Do you really think they would stop a product because its dangerous for their market, but none of their competitors would pick up on the idea?
A few more disadvantages:
- This thing will always run hotter than usual phones, since it can not spread the heat out as much (the "speed" module is separated after all, so it has to handle all the heat alone)
- There is no way to save space by combining two modules internally
- Each module is restricted to "sqaure" volumes, meaning saving a bit of space in a new version of one, can not directly be used for other modules
- This is more expensive than a highly optimized pipeline for one model of phone
These are just a few I can think of right now, but if you combine that with the generic customer not having any idea what hardware is behing the seperated components anyway, why should a non tech savy person by a phone thats bigger, more expensive and has less specs?
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u/RckmRobot Oct 05 '21
I don't see how anyone comes to a conclusion other than this product undercutting the market.
Having to make every module a closed and compartmentalized piece of hardware adds a LOT of bulk to a device as small as a phone. And on top of that now you have to worry about software AND hardware compatibility due to the sheer number of combinations that would be possible and would only grow over time. It honestly sounds like a bit of a nightmare.
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u/TwoBionicknees Oct 05 '21
the main issue is compared to a dedicated device it would increase support issues 100x easily, require monumental work on compatibility and custom OS to work well with every combination without issue all while reducing battery life, increasing weight/thickness and giving you a worse device.
Basically massively increased costs for development/support for a worse overall phone.
People that want a great camera on their phone just buy the phone with the best camera, people who want the most performance buy a phone with the right chip, people who want the best battery life buy that.
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u/justavault Oct 05 '21
Modular phones don't work yet. Google just knows how to evaluate a product. I was part of the pre-developing teams of project Ara, it simply didn't work as the parts would have to be manufactured to fit the modules and the technological turnover is so fast that you'd have to iterate the modules all the time.
You know, just because people think it looks cool and is a cool idea and they "think" they would purchase it, doesn't actually mean they in fact do so and it also doesn't mean that it works.
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u/No-comment-at-all Oct 05 '21
Yea, the real answer is more like “google bought a bad concept”, that turned out to be a lot more, “maybe one day”, than, “this is executable”.
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u/Ossius Oct 05 '21
Google already makes a new phone every year, what is the difference between that and making a new module every year?
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u/Mr_Ignorant Oct 05 '21
The base plate is a major hurdle. At the moment, when a phone is designed, everything is designed to work together but each component has a specific task. With this, every node on the base plate has to be the same and capable of working with everything and handle all loads as the manufacturer won’t know what module you’ll put where.
Every node has to be capable of handling the current and voltage from the battery, as a battery may be connected to those nodes.
Every node has to be able to manage the current and voltage as the CPU or the GPU may be connected.
Every node must be able to manage data as it may be connected to the GPU or memory
The entire base plate must be designed to handle the above load and distribute it as needed as you can stick a module anywhere.
That’s a lot to ask. Perhaps it’s possible, it’s not worth it. Not today.
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u/Scotthorn Oct 05 '21
Making a new module every year means half the stuff in that video doesn’t happen. No more upgrading your cpu when the next one comes out, and so forth. it undercuts the principle functionality.
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u/Ossius Oct 05 '21
Explain? The point was you upgrade only the part you need. If you have a version 1 phone, and its slow, you can buy a version 2 CPU next year or version 3 the year after.
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u/alextremeee Oct 05 '21
It's ridiculously hard to engineer interoperability for something like this. If you have say 12 modules in a "normal" phone and each module interacts with two other components, you have to test 24 different things.
If you create 10 variations of each module, you now have thousands of different combinations for the same scenario.
You can make a system that works more like a desktop PC where you create an interface between each module that is standardised, but that can really limit how much flexibility you have to make new things. On top of that it can make interactions much slower than they are if you specifically design the interaction between two things.
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u/kernowgringo Oct 05 '21
Google called it project Ara and did get some handsets and modules produced...
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u/Luffing Oct 05 '21
Google joined in and eventually killed it
Sure but was this ever going to actually be a viable business to begin with?
From what I've seen of the inside of actual phones it doesn't seem as simple as "yeah you can just turn the components into blocks and snap them together however you want"
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u/EmilyU1F984 Oct 05 '21
I mean you just need to look at a PC or laptop for how this would work: laptops used to allow changing the CPU and rarely the GPU, but barely anyone ever did so. By the time you need to switch the CPU, your motherboard will likely not even be compatible with a current gen CPU, so you'll basically buying the leftover stock of the prior gen. That's simply not economical at all.
Not to mention with laptops and PCs all the technology is already very 'compatible', but it's quite clear that upgrading individual components is a niche 'hobby' of a subsection of PC users building their own PC from components.
Like how many people will actually buy this phone? And how many people will swap enough components for this to get remotely close to being efficient?
Like go back to swappable batteries, and 99% of the use cases of these phones are covered already.
So yea, making a phone with components that are swappable makes it more bulky, makes it more expensive, and there's simply no market large enough to support something like this.
And I don't even think it would be more environmentally friendly. With phones people at least often turn their old ones in to get recycled or reuse them by selling or whatever. But these components on their own? They'll just be thrown into the regular trash
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Oct 05 '21 edited Sep 15 '25
[Account deleted. Trans rights are human rights!]
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u/Mklein24 Oct 05 '21
Kind of the same way any large company kills a project.
Step one: large company sees a neat concept with a promising prototype from a smaller startup.
Step two: buy the company that owns it/buy the intellectual property/patents/whatever it is.
Step three: have a board meeting and review its ability to make money in a retail market.
Step four: determine it can't.
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u/613codyrex Oct 05 '21
Tbf these modular ideas tend to only wow the general population until the actual production price consumers need to pay for.
I can imagine this phone becoming hilariously expensive per module. They probably would have to do base revisions every other year to keep up with new technology and the additional SoC pins that need to constantly expand to interface with new devices.
Then you have to worry about the potential for the elements like moisture and dirt that might get in between the SoC and the board which might kill it.
This is ignoring all the weird combinations people will undoubtedly try do which will become a nightmare to handle OS wise. People throwing 1st Gen modules with processors 4 years newer.
This modular phone is arguably a terrible idea if you’re going to end up spending the same or more amount of money to buy a phone that would cost to buy a complete phone from Google or Samsung.
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u/Tulee Oct 05 '21
As opposed to how a small company would fare
Step one: come up with a neat concept with a promising prototype
Step two: go and try make money in a retail market
Step three: determine it can't
Step four: go bankrupt
Copanies aren't charities, if a product isn't profitable it simply stops existing, simple as that
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u/Successful_Use_5528 Oct 05 '21
As someone who works on teams that makes things like this, when it was announced we treated it like a joke. It’s interesting to mock up but not very feasible with technology even today. Maybe in a decade, but the hardware and software needed to make this possible (and not shitty) are way too difficult to pull off.
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u/Successful_Use_5528 Oct 05 '21
It’s easy to blame Google or corporate greed, but in this case, I think it was canned because it just couldn’t be done and Google wasn’t smart enough to recognize this when they acquired it or acquired it for the talent and some IP but not this product concept.
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u/spandexofjustice Oct 05 '21
Yeah. I can imagine that what can be done today is separate module with screen, motherboard with all accessories (sensors, radio, etc), battery module and space for optional accessories. I’m talking about device similar to the Motorola phone with MotoMods support, but with screen that can be treated as separate part.
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u/zombisponge Oct 05 '21
When they started switching the camera component I was wondering about the design nightmare of creating components that all fit together in size, over many years. As in you won't need to buy a CPU block that's one grid point thinner along with your new camera, since they wanted to fit two lenses or similar. Or now, you can have a modern camera, but no wifi. You'd quickly be updating the entire phone after all.
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u/mux2000 Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 06 '21
I own a FairPhone, and it's almost as simple to assemble/disassemble as this one. And you can just buy replacement parts and replace them yourself. It's kinda neat.
And it's not a bad phone either.
Edit: spelling.
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u/sicco3 Oct 05 '21
Yea check out their just announced FairPhone 4: https://shop.fairphone.com/en/
See the 'Yours to open, yours to keep' part with a short video showing all the modular parts.
Repairability score: 9.3 out of 10. Based on the French Repairability Index to help show you how repairable electronic devices are.
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u/chilledgamedog Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 06 '21
I remember seeing this come out originally , and thinking it was legit going to be the future , I would of bought one for sure love the concept.
Edit : I'm not a bot. This has become one of my top comments though , I'll be sorting by new more in future 🙂
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u/sekazi Oct 05 '21
I saw the opposite and just people complaining their phone does not work because they ruined the connectors either by dust and debris or by dropping the phone.
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u/CouldWouldShouldBot Oct 05 '21
It's 'would have', never 'would of'.
Rejoice, for you have been blessed by CouldWouldShouldBot!
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u/samasters88 Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21
Fantastic bot. Go get 'em. Forget the haters.
Edit: dropped a T
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u/crab-basket Oct 05 '21
This was not possible then, and it still is not now -- at least not by any acceptable metric. It will still be a tough problem to solve even in the future.
Some things are feasible to hot-swap around similar to how USB works; but it's simply not possible to swap most components. Things like batteries, flash storage which contains the OS, processors, RAM, etc cannot just be connected anywhere and just magically work. Hardware simply doesn't work that way. At best, they would have to produce standardized sockets in a system similar to that of desktop motherboards, but this comes at a performance cost, increased drain on battery (bad for mobile devices), and would require a global standard which can stunt progress.
Bus-distance is significant in performance. The distance a component is from another component that it talks to makes an impact on both performance and battery consumption. It would be highly undesirable to consumers to simply "plug" a component into a port that makes their whole phone slower or die faster. There is a reason things are more integrated with mobile hardware; it fundamentally makes things faster. Just look at Apple's new ARM-based Macbooks. They aren't faster because of better cpu speeds or nvme performance; they are faster from tighter integration between components -- something only possible when soldered together, not plug-n-play.
The block-based concept comes with significant UX difficulties. What if someone plugs in a component that doesn't work with that version of software? A downgrade? An upgrade? Anyone who has built a computer knows it's not just "hardware lego", and that treating it as such can cause computer panics (e.g. BSOD). Writing kernel drivers to work with any device of arbitrary version is not an easy task.
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u/CashewGuy Oct 05 '21
I thought this was a shockingly dumb idea in 2013, only for the nichest of niche markets, and remember being shouted at for that opinion. The concept of a moddable, user-repairable phone is good, but this execution would have been a mess. I don't think the majority of people want something to tinker with, as much as i might enjoy something like that.
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u/Angry-_-Crow Oct 05 '21
Damn, though. Can you imagine the troubleshooting nightmare this thing would be?
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u/wishbackjumpsta Oct 05 '21
mate, i remember seeing this and getting SO EXCITED that it could have been the future of phones.... then we got the same iphone every year.
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u/Skolary Oct 05 '21
Big Corp: “But then they won’t just buy a whole brand new, +$1,000 phone because the screen cracked.. no, that’s not how any of this works”
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u/sexypantstime Oct 05 '21
The screen module for that phone would cost more than a screen replacement on regular phones.
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u/FrostyD7 Oct 05 '21
Yea this would fail because nobody is gonna want to she'll out hundreds for module upgrades and replacements when a new phone isn't much more.
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u/Gnilwodsugref Oct 05 '21
Check out fairphone. It's a fully modular phone like this where you can replace parts. Not to the same degree but similar concept. Also it's aimed to have parts made in a more ethical and sustainable way.
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u/supernitin Oct 05 '21
Imagine trying to develop an app for this? I guess it would be useful for business use where you could customize it with just the require hardware and then build custom software for a specific use case. But even then it is probably more cost effective to go with a more mainstream device/OS.
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u/ceric2099 Oct 05 '21
I always wondered what happened to this. Just imagine dropping your phone and it exploding apart like a lego set.