This was Project Ara

[Dash Lambda]

8 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Thinner phones make for lighter phones and they're easier to carry. I think the only one truly chasing even thinner phones now is Apple.
 

I don't think we'd see a huge difference if they made phones thick again. I mean sure you could fit bigger batteries, but the phones would be super heavy. There isn't really anything else they'd need to add that takes up space TBH.

Batteries, storage, cooling (SD 810, anyone?), antennas, sensors, cameras, ports, structural integrity, wireless charging, those are just the things on the top of my head. Thicker phones would even be able to support bigger and more powerful mobile chipsets, which don't really currently exist because no applicable device would support them, which forms a sort of causal loop.

 

I realize that a slightly larger phone with more stuff in it (whether that's battery or otherwise) doesn't fit everybody's needs, but it would fit enough people's needs for it to make a successful product. It astonishes me that there isn't a single phone today whose designers just said "Fuck it, let's just make it thick enough to beat every other phone on every other metric."

It's especially surprising given the prevalence of gaming with smartphones.

[dizmo]

15 minutes ago, Dackzy said:

Yeah I would use that phone, thinness is not my thing, I would take build and the ability to just swap parts out over any thin phone, but I would have made a audio module and the bulge on the camera is just not okay.

But what if the phone you bought had the audio module you wanted in it. Would you even need a modular phone at that point?

5 minutes ago, Dash Lambda said:

Batteries, storage, cooling (SD 810, anyone?), antennas, sensors, cameras, ports, structural integrity, wireless charging, those are just the things on the top of my head. Thicker phones would even be able to support bigger and more powerful mobile chipsets, which don't really currently exist because no applicable device would support them, which forms a sort of causal loop.

 

I realize that a slightly larger phone with more stuff in it (whether that's battery or otherwise) doesn't fit everybody's needs, but it would fit enough people's needs for it to make a successful product. It astonishes me that there isn't a single phone today whose designers just said "Fuck it, let's just make it thick enough to beat every other phone on every other metric."

It's especially surprising given the prevalence of gaming with smartphones.

Storage, antennas and sensors don't really take up much space.

A lot of the phones that are abandoning the 3.5mm jack aren't doing it because of thinness, but because they no longer see them as necessary. I can't think of another jack that would require a thick phone.

Cooling makes sense but I think phones can handle it pretty well already.

The thing with chipsets is, as they advance they get smaller, not bigger. The only thing I can think of is a phone running a laptop grade processor, but the battery requirements would be huge, and the device would be too heavy to comfortably carry.

 

A lot of it comes down to coding, not necessarily simple battery size.

The way I see it is this. If Samsung hasn't tried to make it, there is likely absolutely no market for it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dackzy]

6 minutes ago, dizmo said:

But what if the phone you bought had the audio module you wanted in it. Would you even need a modular phone at that point?

 

Yes, because I can upgrade parts then and change them, if I break them. I kinda want the G5 just because of the B&O module.

[Dash Lambda]

1 minute ago, dizmo said:

Storage, antennas, and sensors don't really take up much space.

But you could fit more, better ones into a slightly larger phone.

 

2 minutes ago, dizmo said:

A lot of the phones that are abandoning the 3.5mm jack aren't doing it because of thinness, but because they no longer see them as necessary. I can't think of another jack that would require a thick phone.

I'm not talking specifically about the 3.5mm headphone jack, but that's an example of one. I remember there being phones with mini-HDMI, which I can see people using, and hey, maybe they could even have a USB host port (not sure if that one's the best idea, but it's an idea). Fact is, you can fit more in a thicker phone.

By the way, Apple replaced the headphone jack with a chamber to improve the barometric pressure sensor. Sure, that might not have been the original reason they removed the jack, but you could have both with a thicker phone.

 

8 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Cooling makes sense but I think phones can handle it pretty well already.

Sometimes not. Current mobile chipsets are designed for extremely low heat output, though, which sort of leads back into that causal loop thing.

 

10 minutes ago, dizmo said:

The thing with chipsets is, as they advance they get smaller, not bigger. The only thing I can think of is a phone running a laptop grade processor, but the battery requirements would be huge, and the device would be too heavy to comfortably carry.

That's not how that works. As processors advance, we can fit more in the same space, which also means we can fit the same amount in a smaller space. Just because there isn't currently any meaningful step between the chipsets in flagship smartphones and the chipsets in low-power laptops doesn't mean there can't be.

[dizmo]

35 minutes ago, Dash Lambda said:

But you could fit more, better ones into a slightly larger phone.

-snip-

Larger doesn't mean better, and I can't think of what other sensors you'd possibly need in a phone.

You can use USB C as an HDMI connection. So. A mini-HDMI port is redundant.

A full sized SD card slot would fit into a bigger phone. But that's soon to be replaced by the far superior UFS cards.

That's basically what I said.

It comes down to market demands. There just isn't one. I'm sure they've done many surveys and market polls.

[Dash Lambda]

24 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Larger doesn't mean better, and I can't think of what other sensors you'd possibly need in a phone.

Of course larger doesn't mean better, a big component can always be worse than a smaller component. Bigger does, however, to a point, mean it can be better.

What sensors to include changes per use case, I just want a tricorder in a phone so I don't have the most reasonable examples.

 

24 minutes ago, dizmo said:

You can use USB-C as an HDMI connection. So. A mini-HDMI port is redundant.

Yes, that's valid, and I'd love to see more things adopt Type-C. Thing with phones, though, is that (to my knowledge) there isn't a phone with a full-featured Type-C port, something that I think would be much easier to put into a slightly larger phone.

 

24 minutes ago, dizmo said:

A full sized SD card slot would fit into a bigger phone. But that's soon to be replaced by the far superior UFS cards.

I never mentioned full-size SD, 'cause that would be silly. In a bigger phone you could fit more on-board storage, faster interfaces, and yes, even a UFS card slot, since nowadays we're lucky if a company spares the space for expandable storage at all.

 

24 minutes ago, dizmo said:

That's basically what I said.

If you're referring to the chipset thing, no, it's not. You said that processors were only getting smaller and the only way to put a more powerful chip into a phone would be to step up to laptop class hardware. If you meant that intermediary chips didn't exist currently, well that's because there isn't a phone that would support it. Again, causal loop.

 

24 minutes ago, dizmo said:

It comes down to market demands. There just isn't one. I'm sure they've done many surveys and market polls.

Well, I'd jump on one, and I know and know of many, many people who would do the same. The entire industry is catering to one single demographic, which is... Infuriating.

[mrchow19910319]

@dizmo  Pay for extra part is fine for me.  If google can cut the price down, that phone is gonna be legendary.  When that day comes , people will not using cellphones as a social status like they are now. It is just a tool. And everyone is using it. 

[SubTract]

I think the idea is great. They've executed it pretty well.
I would have done a few things differently:
The case would be made up of a display and a metal outside bumper of some sort.
The PCB that the modules connect to would have been directly behind the screen and have a very small protective layer covering everything except the interconnects.
The back of the phone would clip on and hold all of the modules firmly in place. Removing the need for the bulky locking magnets.
Try to make the SoC upgrade able. (I imagine this being difficult from a software point of view. Pehaps every 2nd year release a new CPU/GPU/Memory module with the latest components, Only support the latest SoC module for the latest version of android, so if you want to upgrade to the latest android version, you will have to replace your SOC)

[dizmo]

7 hours ago, mrchow19910319 said:

@dizmo  Pay for extra part is fine for me.  If google can cut the price down, that phone is gonna be legendary.  When that day comes , people will not using cellphones as a social status like they are now. It is just a tool. And everyone is using it. 

I don't think it's so much that people use their phones as a status symbol, as it is just liking thin devices.

While I don't mind a device that's a little thicker, I don't want something that large, that thick to carry around regardless of what it can do.

[PocketNerd]

The whole Note 7 fiasco proved that you can only make phones so thin before compromising on things like battery life.

[dizmo]

7 hours ago, PocketNerd said:

The whole Note 7 fiasco proved that you can only make phones so thin before compromising on things like battery life.

Not really. The Note7 wasn't even that thin, there are many, many phones thinner than it.

It also excelled in terms of battery life, doing better than most other phones.

[Indus Monk]

On 11/11/2016 at 4:04 PM, dizmo said:

It's cancelled, this is just how far they got. Or postponed. Which really, is likely cancelled.

Exactly why I don't think it'd succeed. Even if it were slimmer...not really needed.

it is cancelled

[Thony]

On 12/11/2016 at 0:01 AM, ThatOneRussian said:

Who would use that though?

If its that thick? You could have two phones. In your pocket. lol

Uncustomizable phones we have now are just like consoles vs PCs  there would be few people who would geek over it, just like PCs were back in the day, small number of prebuilds compared to present.