Last night, my phone battery died. Normally, I plug my phone in and it’s fine in a few minutes or a few hours, depending on just how dead my phone might be. However, last night, I plugged my phone in and… nothing. I tried multiple chargers and cords, to no avail. I tried rebooting my phone, and nothing. Fortunately, it was a relatively easy fix; the USB port/charging port was bad, and so I paid $50 to have someone replace it for me, rather than spending $12 on a new port and who knows how much in tools to actually do the job. Google might make that problem a thing of the past. Google has developed a modular smart phone dubbed Project Ara.
So what does that mean? Well, that means that if you want a different camera, you remove the camera module and replace it. If you want a new 3-D screen, same deal. If you want a new battery? Same thing. You disconnect the module you want to swap from the phone’s base frame then attach the thing you want to use. It’s the kind of phone that dreams are made of; taking apart my current phone involves special screwdrivers and lots of careful prying; if I could just pull my broken battery module and replace it? Man, that’d be sweet.
“It will be thin, it will be light, it will be beautiful, and we’ll launch it next year,” said Google’s Richard Woolridge at the company’s annual IO developers’ conference.
Tags: google, google phone, google smartphone, smartphones, android phones, android smartphones, project ara, google io, google io conference, richard woolridge, google project ara, project ara, modular smartphone, google modular phone, smartphone with interchangeable accessories