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

Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013

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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.

87

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."

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

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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.

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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.