I want to try and clear up some misunderstanding about Phone Bloks and Project Ara.

[mallenwho]

PSA: TL:DR IN COMMENTS

 

I think there is a huge bunch of misunderstanding about phonebloks and project ara which i will help to clear up.

 

(copied from my comment post on another forum topic. not entirely doubling up, but i want to get this message more widely viewed.)

 

Phonebloks was an idea by one guy, which Google saw the success of and announced Project Ara, which had been in the works for the past half year.

 

Therefore project ara is real and phonebloks is not.

They use the same idea though - modular components on a solid chassis.

Given that you're IN this forum, please don't play the card that 'they'll make you pay an extra $50 for every module'. That is the entire point of the custom desktop PC. If you want basic you get basic and don't ask questions. If you want advanced and powerful it may not be worth your money but you spend it anyway, don't you? The desktop PC keeps down the monopolization by making it an open market with just some self-established guidelines and standards for components (I/O shield, PCI express, etc).

 

Now what happens when you make a phone (or a tablet or a watch) with those same principle? Why would anyone on a forum that praises the custom desktop PC get upset with that! A device that is merely open standards for a market to be established to make and sell things under their own market devices. They can be as competitive or non-competitive as they want but at the end of the day it is the consumers' choice how much they want to spend, and on what features they deem valuable. 

 

Again, lets compare to the desktop PC: why do you have it rather than a complete system from a nearby tech store or (heaven forbid) a mac?? 

a ) you like to put it together and enjoy tinkering with it

b ) you like the personalisation that you can achieve with it over complete systems from other places.

c ) you're fed up with the lack of performance in commercial computers and would rather spend inproportionally more money to receive that performance.

d ) you have the money to buy a commercial pc (barely) but would rather you choose the components you need based on your workload (no GPU but an SSD boot drive. No optical drive but a better cpu. etc)

e ) you like to save the money/resources in upgrading outmoded parts than turfing the whole computer, saving a production cycle and saving you the consumer a lot of money (especially if they re-sell the parts) while maintaining tech relevancy.

 

Now please tell me which one of those does not directly apply to modular consumer electronics.

 

A modular watch or phone's base model is cheap, but you can make it as powerful as you want. $100 for a basic smartwatch is great deal for most people. If you want a beefed up one buy the extra parts and pay $500. Still cheaper than many on the market (COUGH apple). but then you end up with a smarphone-powerful smartwatch which someone would have if they didn't have a smartphone.

In project ara's case. the stock model will be $50. don't think of that as a phone for the plebs. Remove all the stock bloks and build a $900 phone like you would buy an HTC or iphone. Then in the next gen you only spend another $300 on new processor or when you had broken it, $50 for a new screen. Again, look at the comparison to the desktop PC market and ask yourself why you would have anything against it!

 

To the topic of 'why don't they make a modular tablet':

short answer: they will.

long answer: it doesn't matter. 

 

the project ara modules will be intercompatible with each other across any activity, so so long as you have a chassis that can hold them they'll work. A modular tablet is just a larger chassis to put blocks into. Google stated that they want to establish the phone first, starting with a medium phone, then releasing a phablet chassis and mini ipod-nano-6th-gen sized phone chassis, THEN releasing a tablet and who knows an SLR chassis. A drone chassis. a fridge chassis. Something with the same standards that the same block can plug into and work together.

 

So you will have a phone chassis and a tablet chassis and a fridge with a compatible chassis. You keep batteries in each and you take out the storage from one to the other perhaps. or the camera onto the device you want to take the nice pictures with that day. or if you're frugal the nice processor block you swap between devices to save on doubling up buying the stuff. When in the fridge perhaps the storage block gets metadata from the frisge, which when plugged back into the phone alerts health apps and so on.

 

But at the end of the day it doesn't matter whether its a phone or a tablet or a fridge. Physically the difference is screen size but therefore chassis size. All it takes is Google to see Ara's success and release ONE product to support it and WHAM - done.

 

I hope this clears up a bunch of misunderstand that a lot of people (including and especially linus) seem to have.

[Tsuki]

you're not wrong, but you kinda need a tl:dr

[Jack.EXE]

Snippity Snip Snip

Why cant more people think like this?

[Jack.EXE]

you're not wrong, but you kinda need a tl:dr

 

TLDR:

 

Project Ara

 

Some would think it overpriced as some components may be expensive. This however is in the same spirit as a desktop PC that you build yourself. You can have your TitanZ, or your R7-265. Your 5960X, or your 860K.

 

It's up to you to decide on the parts and price, and tailor it to your needs.

 

All it takes is for this one project to take off, and then we will soon see many like it, in all sorts of form factors.

[Captain_Slow]

I can't think of a way this would succeed

[Tsuki]

TLDR:

 

Project Ara

 

Some would think it overpriced as some components may be expensive. This however is in the same spirit as a desktop PC that you build yourself. You can have your TitanZ, or your R7-265. Your 5960X, or your 860K.

 

It's up to you to decide on the parts and price, and tailor it to your needs.

 

All it takes is for this one project to take off, and then we will soon see many like it, in all sorts of form factors.

perfect custom built phone to match your custom built computer, i like it.

[Jack.EXE]

perfect custom built phone to match your custom built computer, i like it.

 

I should become the official forum thread condenser,

[ManWithBeard1990]

I just hope they don't switch sockets as often as I fancy new hardware.

[D4RK]

"insert long post here"

 

lets say a working phone came out of project ara, us costume computers lovers would love to have one and i am sure u would too, but lets say after a while lets say a year, a new gpu/cpu/ram came out now would u buy them and upgrade?, mostly u will pass on a couple generations maybe depending on your performance needs but unlike the computer parts where the increasing performance demand of the new games or software justifies the need for a more powerful computer part in a short time period. now you can argue that unlike pcs more ppl will buy costume phones which is false, since the same reasons that push away average ppl from custom pcs will be the same reasons that push away the same ppl from custom pcs, simply because average ppl dont want to both troubleshooting problems or learning anything about how the product works, they just want a working product without them having to face any problem. "since they cant handle the simplest problems alone"

[Fred Castellum]

I can't think of a way this would succeed

Your not thinking hard enough. If marketed correctly and functional the concept could crush a lot of existing phones and develop a enthusiast playing field.

If the initial core product does well different manufacturer's out there will make modules to get a bite our of the market.

[AlwaysFSX]

Your not thinking hard enough. If marketed correctly and functional the concept could crush a lot of existing phones and develop a enthusiast playing field.

If the initial core product does well different manufacturer's out there will make modules to get a bite our of the market.

Especially if you could get a good phone cheaper than what they cost now.

[mallenwho]

lets say a working phone came out of project ara, us costume computers lovers would love to have one and i am sure u would too, but lets say after a while lets say a year, a new gpu/cpu/ram came out now would u buy them and upgrade?, mostly u will pass on a couple generations maybe depending on your performance needs but unlike the computer parts where the increasing performance demand of the new games or software justifies the need for a more powerful computer part in a short time period. now you can argue that unlike pcs more ppl will buy costume phones which is false, since the same reasons that push away average ppl from custom pcs will be the same reasons that push away the same ppl from custom pcs, simply because average ppl dont want to both troubleshooting problems or learning anything about how the product works, they just want a working product without them having to face any problem. "since they cant handle the simplest problems alone"

 

While mobile performance isn't improving as it did that doesn't mean it won't continue to improve. Processing is all on the one block anyway to save redundancy given you'd have to replace the whole chipset when upgrading anyway.

 

No. Something that the mobile market has to deal with a lot more than desktop is the 'peripherals' to that processing. A gyroscope? a speaker? a camera? a hard drive? a BATTERY? a mount to any number of other devices like a drone? really great wireless? wireless charging? Not even mentioning the phone essentials such as a sim block, bluetooth or internet connection. So on so forth. The hardware selection that accompanies the phone's processing is the defining factor of its functionality not the processing, unlike a desktop. And the functionality of a phone can change day to day. You may want an awesome speaker to share media. you may want an awesome camera to take photos of a planned event. you may want 5000 batteries for a long trip. Because the functionality of the phone can change in a very limited space it doesn't make sense to put in everything and hope it all gets used. Swap out the bits that you want, need and couldn't care less for.

 

THAT is why modularity is important to the mobile market.

[DigitalHermit]

While mobile performance isn't improving as it did that doesn't mean it won't continue to improve. Processing is all on the one block anyway to save redundancy given you'd have to replace the whole chipset when upgrading anyway.

 

No. Something that the mobile market has to deal with a lot more than desktop is the 'peripherals' to that processing. A gyroscope? a speaker? a camera? a hard drive? a BATTERY? a mount to any number of other devices like a drone? really great wireless? wireless charging? Not even mentioning the phone essentials such as a sim block, bluetooth or internet connection. So on so forth. The hardware selection that accompanies the phone's processing is the defining factor of its functionality not the processing, unlike a desktop. And the functionality of a phone can change day to day. You may want an awesome speaker to share media. you may want an awesome camera to take photos of a planned event. you may want 5000 batteries for a long trip. Because the functionality of the phone can change in a very limited space it doesn't make sense to put in everything and hope it all gets used. Swap out the bits that you want, need and couldn't care less for.

 

THAT is why modularity is important to the mobile market.

 

This is a good point that you make...

 

However, having a modular phone is slightly better than having 32 different tiers of the same line of a phone being out at the same time...

 

I do see the point of dropping modularity...

 

A better idea would be having a few standard form factors (like the ATX/mATX/mITX)... The manufacturers would then just need to change out a few chips/parts to make the phone a different tiered device... They can try to have individualized exteriors, however, the innards are intercompatible with other brands... So if, say, the screen breaks on one phone, the internals can be salvaged and put into a phone whose internals are broken... or something like that...

[Captain_Slow]

Your not thinking hard enough. If marketed correctly and functional the concept could crush a lot of existing phones and develop a enthusiast playing field.

If the initial core product does well different manufacturer's out there will make modules to get a bite our of the market.

 

 

Especially if you could get a good phone cheaper than what they cost now.

 

 

so, Project Ara

 

a single backbone, and lots of peices to go onto it.

 

for this to be a good experience, there needs to be four things done right

 

1. Software and driver compatability, everything needs to work seemlessly with the OS, we could rely on each manufacturer of each part to create drivers but then we run into the issue of doing an update and possibly having one of your components not be compatible. So there needs to be a central validation process to ensure users are not locked out of certain blocks while doing updates, presumeably done by google.

 

2. the parts need to be cheap enough, which means they will need to have economies of scale. But even if it gets that economy of scale it still won't add up to be cheaper than a current phone, because they need to individually package each component with I/O, and they will need to spend time making and optimizing drivers.

 

3. there need to be a large variety of parts to choose from. Ara would be pointless if you only have 1-3 choices per part

 

4. the resulting Phone needs to be thin enough, it'll probably be pretty thick.

 

 

you're all imagining that it will be like PC, where you have a large variety of choices from each part from lots of OEMs that all work under windows, but it wont be like that at all, it'll be more like when linux first got started, with limited hardware choices and a metric butt tone of driver and optimization issues. I hope it succeeds, but no I cant think of a way it would, at least not anytime soon.

[Fred Castellum]

-snip-

Ahhh pooh you made the assumption I think it's gonna be like a how a PC is modular? Sure that could be used as a analogy but It's obviously going to have a lot of technical difficulties to overcome in order to work. 

 

*shrugs*

[ShadowCaptain]

Ahhh pooh you made the assumption I think it's gonna be like a how a PC is modular? Sure that could be used as a analogy but It's obviously going to have a lot of technical difficulties to overcome in order to work. 

 

Yeah we will get into the issues of driver problems, compatability issues

For example, somebody makes a new camera module, but it does not take into account the microphone module you have installed, 

 

Also what is to stop google from forcing you to upgrade parts just like we do know, sure modularity allows us to create a great phone but it will still get out dated just as fast as now

 

 

Also, the main thing, lets say a new camera module comes out, and there are 50 to choose from..... since there are less people buying your specific module it will have to be sold for more money...  whereas currently, samsung/apple/htc just order 2 million of the same camera and pay a few dollars for each uni

 

Modules will not be sold in as much bulk as with a  traditional phone surely making the price of each part higher

[mallenwho]

economies of scale are an issue but we're forgetting the margins these companies make on their phones. I seem to remember that the BOM cost of an iphone was less than $100, if not less than $200. Even if parts are 4 times the cost of what apple pays its still cheaper.

 

And we don't have 50 desktop pc companies. we have a half dozen in each catagory. Motherboards: ASrock, ASUS, gigabyte. PSUs: corsair, antec, silverstone, coolermaster. GPUs: nvidia, gigabyte, ASUS, AMD. That's not 50 companies. 

 

And i don't think there are 50 companies making camera in the world anyway. I imagine for a sound block we will end up with 2 or 3 Sennheiser blocks, maybe a Shure block or two and a couple of others. For cameras we will end up with 3 or 4 Canon blocks and 3 or 4 nikon blocks. Just because anyone CAN make a block doesn't mean they will and you will still end up with only a few compeditive options in each catagory.

 

And many components don't get outdated at all: vibrator, gps, storage, etc. Some blocks like the screen or sound block will die from damage, and some like the processor will be outmoded. But you replace the one $50 thing that breaks rather than the $300 of stuff that works fine and will always work fine.