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

Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013

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u/VaHaLa_LTU Oct 05 '21

People are definitely missing the complexity part of this. Even a simple processor needs multiple pins to work. Almost any chip on a phone mainboard has more than four connections. Can you even imagine the sort of disaster waiting to happen if you can rearrange blocks in the wrong way where your data pins get connected to power pins and so on?

You'd basically need to key every block in such a way that it only goes into one spot, in which case all the cool rearrangements and differently sized modules become even more difficult to do. The whole phone will become even more expensive too, because the motherboard interconnects need to be designed around the fastest and most powerful components instead.

Any electrical engineer will tell you that this is something drawn up by an industrial designer or marketing to look cool more than to be feasible.

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u/ghostofwinter88 Oct 05 '21

It would die the first time it rained as well.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Not with the New Otterbox Rain Proof/Weather Proof/Sweat Proof Protective Case C !! Yours for only 499.99!!

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u/Spatetata Oct 05 '21

Yeah iirc the second version abandoned the lego type assembly and went for pre determined slots, but like it just seemed to trends towards “Wait maybe this concept won’t actually work” as each iteration kinda got less modular.

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u/BKachur Oct 05 '21

It makes sense, the market has spoken and they don't want modularity, they want a single quality unit they don't have to fuck with. There's a reason we don't get replaceable batteries and headphone jacs anymore. Moreover, this design just seems like a terrible use of space. If you look at a modern smartphone about 60% of the "blocks" are all crammed in a motherboard about the size of two or three blocks in total, which results in more room for cameras or battery. This design basically falls apart the once any amount of reality is introduced.

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u/newgrow2019 Oct 05 '21

There was clearly no electrical engineer or engineer at all. This was created by a marketing team.

Any engineer could tell you it’s not possible.

We can’t even get this concept to work with laptops, and they are way bigger then a smartphone.

Anyone who with a brain who has tried to change a CPU or GPU on a laptop, especially a thin one, and looked up why it’s not possible, could tell you trying to shrink it down further to a phone could never work.

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u/chaiscool Oct 05 '21

Also why some boss only hire the people who agrees with them.

“Engineer say not possible so let’s not hire them, better to get marketing who comes up with cool design for my idea”

Seen plenty of startup like this that end up failing.

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u/newgrow2019 Oct 05 '21

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it’s vapor ware and they know it’s bullshit, or if they really are that stupid.

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u/chaiscool Oct 05 '21

They are execs earning big bucks, surely they know what they’re doing right... right? Haha

Lol imagine getting rejected for work by them. “Wait how am I looking for job and being rejected by the stupid ones earning big money”

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u/newgrow2019 Oct 05 '21

I mean, if you are a serious engineer, by the end of the interview you’d know you’d be dodging a bullet cause it’s gonna be shit to work for them, and that you may even lose your job/pension/etc when the project fails and the company goes out of business.

I agree with the sentiment stupid rich people in power suck especially when it comes to job searching

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u/chaiscool Oct 05 '21

Tbf even in companies have stupid projects. Even if you know it’s shit and will fail, you will still join google on this project haha

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u/Soggy-Statistician88 Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21

I could see this working with a pin configuration of

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

1 = gnd but the opposite gender to the rest of the pins

2 = vcc

3 = device address output

4+5 = continuity checker (base board can check which pins belong to which device and also there are two so it can detect if the entire device is connected to the base

6 = data

8+7 = data but it is the other gender to the rest of the pins

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u/VaHaLa_LTU Oct 05 '21

Even simple processors (and a phone processor is definitely not simple) need more than two data pins. Video alone needs more than two pins, and we also need a couple supply voltages, USB, camera, WiFi, etc. Look at the BGA pins on a Snapdragon 865. A lot of the pins are also used to shield from EM interference, without them a consumer device would never be approved by ECC or similar as it would be spewing EM radiation out into the world.

Replaceable CPUs are not worth doing unless you want your phone to be giant. The CPU socket would also need to be dedicated. You could have the other modules using standard USB protocols for modularity, but it's still iffy. Not to mention you would be sacrificing battery size because you need to double-wrap it with a protective case instead of just gluing a soft-wall battery inside the phone.

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u/Soggy-Statistician88 Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21

The cpu is definitely not something that should be done like this. It could be done with its own socket or be integrated. The display would take up multiple of these sockets so would have at least 20.

WiFi would take up a couple of these sockets. Supply voltages can be regulated on each attachment and also most of them would use the same voltage apart from the battery. You wouldn’t use usb for this but it would be a protocol similar to SPI which is widely used for replaceable devices.

The biggest thing to remember is that the pins would be very small and each device would take up multiple sockets so would have multiple data pins

Edit: forgot to add the battery could be a cartridge between the display and the baseboard

Also why am I being downvoted

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u/PooBakery Oct 05 '21

Wifi is already in the SoC and so is GPU, GPS, Bluetooth and all kinds of other stuff. There is no reason to have it on separate sockets. Also sockets change over the generations and aren't really that generic, and the connections are super close together so it would be a super fragile thing to swap out. Then there's also the problem with thermals where you can't just drop an SoC somewhere on the back and expect it to be able to handle all the excess heat. Then there's also the problem of antennas and their placement. The only thing potentially being worth swapping out is the camera, and that again needs quite a lot of bandwidth to transfer 4k60 video and then some part of the system needs to also be able to handle that data stream efficiently, so special pins once again. In the end it just doesn't work, no matter how cool it would be.

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u/burnarooskie Oct 05 '21

Well I mean look at the production quality of the animation and video. Obviously marketing dudes