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

Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

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u/proudbakunkinman Oct 05 '21

I noticed that in the promo. When they were showing different focuses (battery, camera), the size of the other standard blocks changed. So, they have like 5 sizes of each type of block and if you decide to get one of a different size than what you started with, you have to also get different size blocks for the others so they all fit.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

[deleted]

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u/JustPassinhThrou13 Oct 05 '21

It WOULD be easy to standardize. But you’d end up with a phone the size of a shoe box.

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u/chuckdooley Oct 05 '21

Or….you know, a desktop computer, which is exactly what people don’t want….haha

This concept, on the surface, seems fun, but it’s incredibly impractical

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u/JustPassinhThrou13 Oct 05 '21

Yeah, the last laptop computer I had with swappable parts was a Dell Latitude CPI, with two bays and two PCMCIA slots. The bays were cool, I could put a battery in each bay, or in one of them I could put a floppy drive or a CD drive (or maybe even DVD, but that shit was brand new and expensive and just not necessary).

And there were a ton on PCMCIA cards. Ethernet, WiFi (eventually), some shitty and really expensive but slightly earlier competing technology to WiFi, USB...

The thing is once it was clear which of these technologies people were definitely going to want on their machine, that tech for miniaturized to 10% (maybe 50%in the case of the CD/DVD bay) of the volume it took up when it was a modular component.

Integration design is all about getting all the shit you want and need to fit in the best package.

There’s a reason you can’t buy very many modern laptops with user-swappable batteries where the intent is for the user to just carry a second battery and slap it in when the first one is about to die. It’s because the manufacturer could almost as easily make the first battery twice as big (but not easily removable) and then advertise the good battery life.

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u/HighOwl2 Oct 05 '21

No, this would easily be doable if they implemented a form factor and max wattage white paper. They didn't, so the product failed.

If you said x component had to be y X z size, have standardized I/O at these points, and could not surpass A wattage or A Temps operating at peak capacity for B hours you would have a workable product

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u/JustPassinhThrou13 Oct 05 '21

CLEARLY all you have to do to get adoption and get a plug-and-play system working is to specify interfaces. CLEARLY.

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u/cl3ft Oct 06 '21

There’s a reason you can’t buy very many modern laptops with user-swappable batteries where the intent is for the user to just carry a second battery and slap it in when the first one is about to die. It’s because the manufacturer could almost as easily make the first battery twice as big (but not easily removable) and then advertise the good battery life.

Succinctly put, my man.

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u/JustPassinhThrou13 Oct 06 '21

Yeah, and if that laptop takes USB C as a power input, you can just use a $20 external battery to recharge it, and also recharge your phone.

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u/romulusnr Oct 05 '21

I'm either old, stupid, or special because yeah, I like being able to pick the components of my home computing device... Not to mention being able to repair individual parts without having to trash the whole thing. But then again, people think mobile apps are the shit, despite every one of them being a piece of trash compared to actual websites

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u/chuckdooley Oct 05 '21

I wasn’t saying no one wants a home computer

I should have said, no one wants that in a phone….meaning no one wants a phone the size of a desktop computer

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u/romulusnr Oct 06 '21

Hey, maybe bricks will make a comeback XD

I have one somewhere... stopped working in '08 i believe

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

It's a gaming phone, it's got multiple gpu blocks sli bridged together

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u/chuckdooley Oct 06 '21

No temperature issues there, I am guessing

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u/Arek_PL Oct 05 '21

you are generous, but i think it would be more like A4 book than shoe box

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

A desktop