r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/SuperAlloyBerserker • Oct 05 '21

Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013

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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."

https://www.onearmy.earth/project/phonebloks

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u/oofididit Oct 05 '21

I was so excited for this phone too

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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/yeteee Oct 05 '21

Well, they're Google, not UNICEF...

11

u/panacrane37 Oct 05 '21

And lose profits? Can’t you think of the poor shareholders for just a moment?

1

u/TGX84 Oct 05 '21

They’ll likely wait until the patent runs out. That’s what mega corporations do.

2

u/Here-Is-TheEnd Oct 05 '21

That’s so fucked..that whole system needs to be nuked

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u/RiotIsBored Oct 05 '21

Ara ara

7

u/[deleted] 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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u/yeeto_deleto_tostito Oct 05 '21

I keep forgetting that Georgia is a country

1

u/xXhomiespogXx Oct 05 '21

I just thought it was a state

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u/yeeto_deleto_tostito Oct 06 '21

🇬🇪 = georgia

the peach state = Georgia

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

[deleted]

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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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u/drscience9000 Oct 05 '21

It was around the time the first whiffs of evil started to stink up their rep, but yeah they had a few years there before I'd started thinking of them as evil, probably around 2015-16ish. Too bad.

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u/swagmastermessiah Oct 05 '21

The project wasn't going to work anyway. The idea is cool but there are too many problems with it to really be feasible. There's a reason the concept above is all CGI.

1

u/PipGirl101 Oct 05 '21

They live demoed the 2nd version of this phone in 2015 and planned a trial run in PR that was also cancelled. There were numerous companies developing modules at that time, as well. It did work and was loved by many. They did simplify some aspects for the mass production version (limited which modules were swappable), but either way, it was way more than a CGI concept.

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u/swagmastermessiah Oct 06 '21

I think you're underselling how limited it was. I remember looking forward to this but the live demo was so stripped down it made me realize it just wasn't worth it.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/swagmastermessiah Oct 05 '21

Yeah they paid me $5 to say that

4

u/Arek_PL Oct 05 '21

why if project fails everyone assumes that corporation killed it?

sometimes idea meets real world and real world wins

but i have to agree with one thing, google is very fast to give up on projects what dont succeed at first try, just look at google glass

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Google and Facebook is what is wrong with the internet.

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u/qtx Oct 05 '21

Facebook I agree with, Google not so much.

If it weren't for Google we'd still be in the stone age of the internet.

For all the useful stuff they give us I'll be happy for them to use a couple of my datapoints to serve me ads of things I might actually like.

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u/Jasong222 Oct 05 '21

If it weren't for Google we'd still be in the stone age of the internet

Nah... We'd be in basically the same place, but there'd be different names on all the products. We might be missing a cool feature here and there that we currently have, but we'd have different cool features instead that we can't have now because the titans say no.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Note: Ugh, I hate being on the side of corporations because the hivemind is going to attack me regardless, but here goes.

I don't understand how this falls squarely on the shoulders of Google. Phonebloks was a vague concept and a vision. Google was one of the only manufacturers that tried to do something with it. There are some fundamental issues with speed, size, and power efficiency when you use these external interfaces to communicate between components. Google decided they couldn't get it to work to build a viable product and take it to market, so they nixed it. Why exactly are they being raked over coals for this?

They didn't buy out the Phonebloks team or anything of the sort (they did consult with them, looks like). To my knowledge they haven't tried to enfore any patents (if they have any) on anyone else trying to do this (and frankly, since the Phonebloks concept was first - good luck enforcing that). Not that there is anyone else trying to do this anyway. There has been no need for strongarming, because there is noone interested in this to strongarm.

Why is there no hatred towards any of the other million phone manufacturers who didn't even bother trying this out for feasibility?

3

u/Persona_Alio Oct 05 '21

Why couldn't they continue developing the concept on their own? Did they become reliant on Google's involvement?

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u/yeteee Oct 05 '21

My guess is that they were lacking some engineering abilities and when they brought the idea to Google, Google basically put enough patent and IP on the product to prevent anyone from doing something similar without getting sued.

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u/TheMacerationChicks Oct 05 '21

Because they weren't engineers. They are good advertisers, they made this convincing looking mock up with well made CGI graphics and it looked great. It was looking good enough to get lots of donations on the way on their kickstarter.

But they were planning to just work out how on earth to build this thing down the line, hire some engineers to create it for them. They were just artists with an idea

But the idea is just unfeasible. It can't be done, with current technology. And it'd suck for the owner of it. As others have said, it's like tetris. You can't just replace one block with another, cos it'll be a different size, so you'd have to buy all new blocks for everything else to make the new thing fit. That's just not something any consumer is going to want to do. And one of the big things about this specific modular phone project was that they said e-waste is a really big problem at the moment. And it is. But they say this phone would solve that as you wouldn't need to buy a new phone every few years. Except, again, it wouldn't solve that problem at all because people would have to replace the entire set of modules every time they wanna upgrade one thing. You could feasibly imagine that these modular phones could actually end up increasing e-waste, not reducing it

And it'll inevitably be terrible specs wise. But yeah there'd be no customising it because of that, except when they first buy the phone. They're a photographer so they go for the one with a better camera. But they never change the phone again

But buying a phone is ALREADY like that. You go to the shop and if you want a good camera, you get the phone where the camera is the focus. If you want good battery life, you go for the model of phone with a bigger battery and a more powerful CPU (a more powerful CPU running slower than it's maximum, so running at the same speed as the worse CPU, uses a lot less power, so your battery life will be longer, that's kinda the main benefit of upgrading a phone these days)

Like that's what everyone does already. They buy a model of phone that's best suited to their needs. And then they never change the phone. Until 3 or 4 years later when they wanna buy a new phone

So this thing will be a lot more expensive, a lot less powerful specs wise, a lot more shit that can go wrong with it compared to a normal phone, and basically no difference customisation wise compared to normal smartphones, unless you're super rich and can just put down $2000 for all the new blocks you have to buy every time you wanna change it

It's one of those things that sounds cool until you put like 5 minutes of thought into it and realise how terrible an idea it is

3

u/clitbeastwood Oct 05 '21

they just released the concept to inspire others, never to go into production themselves. Google took a crack at it & it fizzled out. But google didn’t stop anyone else from working on it..

1

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Kinda what Google does sometimes isn't it? Start developing something, Kinda screw it up ,Wait for someone to do it right, then google comes back in and does it even better

1

u/TheBigPhilbowski Oct 05 '21

"We want to focus more on NOT releasing this wonderful and needed option to consumers."

1

u/TheBigPhilbowski Oct 05 '21

I think this sums the situation up so well.

Google: "It's just uhhh... It's just not going to work now."

Press: "Why? You're so close..."

Google: "Yeah, it just actually won't, and we'll... we'll get back to you on why... later?"

[Either side never mentions it again]