Project Ara To Be Released In Early 2015 For $50
You may have heard of Google’s Project Ara. is an initiative by Google that aims to develop a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. The project will include a frame that will hold all the smartphone modules that an user opts for (a display, keyboard, maybe an extra battery, etc.). The project allows users to swap out malfunctioning modules or even upgrade individual modules as innovations emerge. Project ARA was originally started by the Advanced Technologies group which was part of Motorola Mobility, which was a subsidiary of Google, but as you know, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. Well, Google kept the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group to work on Project Ara under the Android division of Google. Project Ara was announced last year, on October 29th.
A recent report suggested that the we will see the first results from Project Ara in early 2015 and it may be as low as fifty bucks. Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group is rumored to have a working prototype on their hands in just a few weeks, but for the first consumer version we will have to wait until the first quarter of 2015. It also seems that the ATAP group intends to initially offer a very basic, low budget option that users could build on.
That low budget option would cost fifty bucks as we mentioned above and to some it may not even fit the definition of a smartphone as it won’t be capable of a cellular connection, instead only offering WiFi. However, as we mentioned, that would be just the basic model that users would build on. In Google’s and ATAP group’s vision, users will buy the basic $50 model and the upgrade it with whatever they need in order to build their own perfect smartphone. Buying more modules or upgrading existing ones, could lead to a high end smartphone with similar hardware to that of Samsung’s or Apple’s flagship form next year. Such as smartphone would be a very good option in emergent markets, where people cannot afford to buy a high end smartphone, but may want to build their own over time.
Of course that doesn’t mean that the modular smartphones from Google are going to only be released in emergent markets; they will most likely be released in all global markets, though it is not clear where they will be released first. In any case, the modular smartphones are set to come in three different size variants: a mini variant, a medium variant and a jumbo variant which will probably be the equivalent of today’s phablets. The size is the only part of the smartphone that you won’t be able to change so you will have to choose it carefully. Each frame will incorporate an electronic backbone that will have all the replaceable modules and all the frames will be made by Google. This also means that Google will have direct control over every Ara smartphone, or at least over each frame or core.
If you are worried that a modular smartphone means you will lose some of the things you got used to from modern smartphones, ATAP group says that won’t be the case. With the current module, which is 4 mm in thickness, the Ara smartphone won’t be more than 10 mm thick with all the modules installed. Of course, that’s thicker than the last iPhone 5S, but it is less thick than earlier smartphones and even modern smartphones such as the Nokia Lumia 1020. The ATAP group inside Google also mentioned that all the replaceable modules that you will be able to connect to your Ara smartphone, are going to be firmly locked to the smartphone so they won’t fall accidentally or detach when the Ara smartphone is dropped. It seems that detaching a module will require you to first using an app which will then engage the unlock mechanism from inside the Ara smartphone.
Regarding the replaceable modules from a project Ara smartphone, we don’t have too many details right now. We don’t know who would manufacture them (what are the other companies that Google will allow to make their own modules? Probably most if not all of them, but we have no official confirmation at the moment) and we don’t know what they might be. There would most likely be replaceable modules for cameras and for batteries, which sounds nice as you can replace your Ara smartphone’s battery module with a new battery module consisting of a higher capacity battery. Or replace your old camera module with a new one, of higher resolution. We will get some details regarding both questions next month, when the ATAP group from Google will be holding a series of conferences.
In a recent interview with Time, Project Ara’s leader, Paul Eremenko says that “The question was basically, could we do for hardware what Android and other platforms have done for software? [...] Which means lower the barrier to entry to such a degree that you could have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of developers as opposed to just five or six big [manufacturers] that could participate in the hardware space“. Another aspect of the upcoming Project Ara is that the visual aspect of an Ara smartphone can also be customized, just like its hardware. It seems that Google will allow consumers to customize both the style and material of each replaceable module’s enclosure; you will even be able to replace the enclosure.
We won’t lie; of all the projects in the mobile industry, we were most impressed by Google’s Project Ara. It is an impressively innovative project that, if done right, has the potential to forever change the industry. However, the project is still in the early stages of development, even though the team expects to have a prototype ready this month. According to Paul Eremenko, Project Ara was started in the Fall of 2012 and the ATAP group consists of only a few members. Such a small team could not have handled the development of such an ambitious project by itself, so there was a lot of help from contractors. The ATAP group is hard at work to have the first Ara smartphone released to consumers in 2015 for a price of fifty bucks. And while there is plenty of time until 2015, there are also many things to do when working on such an ambitious project, that we reiterate, has the potential to change the mobile industry forever. We are very excited about Google’s Project Ara and we hope you are too. We would like to know what you think about Project Ara, so leave your comments in the dedicated section below.
