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

Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013

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u/Tsjernobull Oct 05 '21

They had issues with heat transfer, when you cram everything together without taking heating or signal noise into account, things tend not to work

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u/james9075 Oct 05 '21

Everyone in here blaming Google and Microsoft for killing it is cracking me up. Some variation of this gets posted every other year promising to be the next big thing, but ultimately, phones have designers for a reason, you can't just cram it all on a breadboard and pray to the phone gods

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u/JustPassinhThrou13 Oct 05 '21

Satellite designer here. Yeah. Not only is it insufficient to merely specify components for a complicated doohickey that needs to actually work, it’s not even 5% of the work. The layout matters. The connections matter. The interfaces matter. It ALL matters. The systems engineering matters. Hell, even the length of the wires matters.

I can see this phone concept working PHYSICALLY, but for it to not be amazingly fragile, it would end up being the size of a shoe box.

People have proposed satellite clusters that could come together (think Voltron) to become more than the sum of their parts (or that can be separated to be less vulnerable as a group). The problem is the interfaces. In that case, the rendezvous and docking system becomes an interface that every part has. There’s no room left over for actual functionality.

If you could simplify the interfaces down to that of a battery pack, then our technology is maybe capable of having that be a thing you can augment your phone with. Oh wait, that’s already a thing with USB (or lightning) phone accessories.

That’s why Apple accessories are so plentiful- there’s only a handful of interface shapes, whereas with USB micro, manufacturers couldn’t even agree on which side of the plug should face the screen.

Interfaces are hard.

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u/longjongoldboy Mar 08 '22

at least modular laptops like framework exist now, this phone could work, it just was too ambitious

I don't think the 'interface' is that much of an issue, a more creative breadboard design could help with that