Items tagged with Phonebloks
When Phonebloks visionary Dave Hakkens began evangelizing the idea of a modular phone with interchangeable components, many scoffed at the idea saying it couldn't be done or wasn't commercially feasible, that is until Google stepped up and backed a team of engineers for Project Ara. Ultimately, Project Ara's proof of concept efforts bore fruit and the vision is quickly becoming reality, now with apparently new competitors entering the fray. A start-up company by the name of Vsenn has come out of cover to disclose it's intention to start a "smartphone evolution" and it also turns out that company has been co-founded by a former Nokia Android X Program Manager, according to the tease at their web...
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Google’s Project Ara, an effort to develop a modular smartphone platform, sounded at first as much like vaporware as anything we’ve ever encountered, but Google is actually making it happen. In a whimsically upbeat YouTube video, Dave Hakkens (the guy who created the Phonebloks design that appears to be the conceptual basis for Project Ara) visited the Google campus to see what progress is being made on the project. The teams working on Project Ara have figured out a key solution to one of the first problems they encountered, which was how to keep all the modules stuck together. They decided to use electro-permanent magnets, and you can see in the video how that process works. In...
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Motorola has embarked on the ambitious and exciting Project Ara, an effort to realize the vision of the PhoneBloks concept of a modular smartphone, and it sounds as though things are rolling along faster than most might expect. In an interview with YouTuber (and professional ultimate Frisbee player) Marques Brownlee, Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside dropped some information on Project Ara’s progress (around the 12-minute mark). “There is a prototype,” he said. “And it is pretty close [to the original PhoneBloks concept]”. He said that the device has a basic skeleton, and that “the components literally slide in and out.” However, Woodside also noted...
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Motorola is forging ahead with the concept of modular, customizable smartphones first put forth by designer Dave Hakkens with his Phonebloks. The company said recently that it was officially pursuing such an idea with Project Ara, and Motorola is already putting together important partnerships to make it happen. 3D Systems, a maker of 3D printers and other related products, has signed on to create a “continuous high-speed 3D printing production platform and fulfillment system” for it. In other words, 3D Systems is going to print parts for the project, and what’s more, the company has what appears to be an exclusive agreement to make all the enclosures and modules for Project...
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Our eyes got all misty dreaming about the future portended by the Phonebloks modular smartphone design when we heard about it in September, but thanks to Google-owned Motorola (as well as Dave Hakkens, the Phonebloks designer), that future could be coming astonishingly fast. Motorola announced that it’s actively working on modular smartphone designs via its Project Ara. It’s a project of the Motorola Advanced Technology and Projects group, and the very words Paul Eremenko uses to describe it in a blog post are a breath of fresh air: “We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers...
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The maker space has seen its share of modular hardware projects, to be sure, (including ones pertaining to handsets), but one Dave Hakkens is looking to push things even further with Phonebloks, which is essentially a set of modules that create a complete smartphone when combined. The idea is that a handset can be broken down into individual components; for example, there could be a storage module, a battery module, a camera module, a display module, and so on. Thus, if for example you aren’t happy with your smartphone’s terrible camera, instead of replacing the whole unit, you could simply swap in a new camera module and get a nice upgrade. The operating system could be Android,...
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