Imagine if you could customize your smartphone to fit your needs, and we’re not talking software here. We’re talking about an endoskeleton for a Smartphone in which you can plug different components to make your phone exactly how you see it fit.
Some of us love music while others love photography, some love movies while others love games,
We all like different things, for example, colour orange, a bigger screen, more memory, a better camera, better sound quality, HD display, a longer battery life, cool designs and everything we think that makes up a perfect Smartphone.
But we always have to compromise on something or the other when buying a Smartphone, right? Well, not anymore.
Imagine if you could upgrade just your phone camera because you found a sudden craze for photography. Imagine if you lost your interest in photography and found a new one in music, all you have to do is downgrade your camera and upgrade your sound card. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
Next year, you will be able to replace specific hardware parts in your smartphone and not the entire phone itself, thanks to Google’s Project Ara.
Project Ara is a collaboration between Google and PhoneBloks to create absolutely customizable Smartphones, both hardware and software.
Google will only manufacture the endoskeleton frames called “endos”, the modules can be bought from any third party manufacturers and inserted into the frame. However, the endoskeleton will only accept registered modules, kind of like the Google Playstore. It is totally up to you if you want to allow other modules to communicate with your Smartphone.
Project Ara was conceptualized in 2012 and work started in 2013, it works on an open source technology and the Software Development Kit (SDK) is already available on www.projectara.com along with various licenses, you can also check out the www.makewithmoto.com movement.
The SDK is called Spiral 3 and was introduced in Google’s DevCon earlier this year.
It’s only a matter of time before you can build your own smartphone, so maybe you should start brushing up on your Lego skills.
