The PC of Smart Phones?

[strife]

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Google-owned phone firm Motorola has announced a new project to let users customise their smartphone components.

Project Ara allows users to buy a basic phone structure and add modules such as keyboard, battery or other sensors.

Motorola has partnered with Dutch designer Dave Hakkens, who has created Phonebloks, a modular phone idea, on the project.

Experts were unsure on how big a shake-up for the mobile phone industry the customisable handsets would represent.

In a blog post, Motorola said that it had been working on the project for more than a year.

"We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software - create a vibrant, third-party developer ecosystem," the firm wrote in a blog post.

"To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it's made of, how much it costs and how long you'll keep it."

The project will consist of what Motorola is calling an endoskeleton, the frame that will hold all the modules in place.

"A module can be anything from a new application processor to a new display or keyboard, an extra battery, a pulse oximeter - or something not yet thought of," the firm said.

I'm immediately skeptical(mainly due to design implications and the compact size of smartphones), but it would be pretty awesome that in 2 years, I could just upgrade the processor and ram on my phone instead of shelling out a couple hundred bucks for a completely new one.

[Moristans]

Oh, the irony, considering what handhelds have done to the PC market.

[Jakensama]

Nice idea, but in reality I doubt most consumer's care enough. A smartphone can last a couple years and still run everything fairly well - after that upgrading the guts might help but by that point your casing is probably showing it's age too.

[Slamz]

I see it being more valuable to developers who want to build up and sell a custom device with custom features. e.g., maybe you could use this to help make a "skydive phone". It's a regular phone but also contains an altimeter and whatever else may be handy for skydivers. You probably wouldn't expect skydivers to buy the parts to assemble it themselves but some 3rd party could use the system to assemble it and sell it as a whole product.

They could do that now but they'd probably have to sell a million of them to justify the cost of developing and selling a new type of phone. A piecemeal system has some possibilities.

[OrsunVZ]

It makes some sense from a B2B view point. There are plenty of organizations that could integrate industry specific tools with customized apps. I could easily see a quantity surveyor, for instance, who takes measurements with his phone that relays all the info to a master database that compiles all of the work the other surveyors are simultaneously doing.