I'm definitely also excited, but I'm quite cautious in my optimism. Such a project would involve a large number of engineering challenges on top of those that already exist in smartphone design.
As cool as this concept seems, I just don't see it being practical. smartphones, more than any other device are volume constrained. Most consumers, given the choice between additional battery capacity and more modularity would choose the former. For me, it's just a no brainer. This is all to say nothing of the nightmare that is mobile SOCs. There exists absolutely no standardized platform in the smartphone space as there does for PCs. There are pretty staggering platform differences, even comparing 2 generations of mobile SOC's from the same vendor.
Not a bad point, but in any case my point still stands: all other things being equal (the thickness of the phone included), you can get modularity or a bigger battery, not both
Take a look at the camera module. If you can't find it, it's to the left of the camera window in the rear housing. Yes, that's the whole camera, optics and all. Now take a look at the battery and tell me how you're going to be able to substitute a meaningful amount of battery for the camera.
Then tell me about how you plan to make multiple batteries of dissimilar size and potentially different battery chemistry (cell voltage) work together and integrate into any random phone backplane you might buy. Apple has boasted about managing to use differing cells on their laptops, where they have all the space in the world for duplicating charge controller circuitry. In a system like this, you'd pretty much have to declare that every battery module must contain its own intelligent charge/discharge controller. Great, so now we have a serious amount of active intelligent electronics in the battery.
That segues into a larger problem, pretty much the fundamental problems with this concept. Ordinary cellphones rely on high integration to reduce power consumption and component count. Many functions are integrated into the SoC, and those which aren't are still pretty tightly tied to the SoC (for example, camera modules talk to phone SoCs through an interface designed just for cameras). If you want to make a "phoneblok" system where any "blok" site can hold a blok implementing just about any function, this forces the use of a generic, standardized, high performance, hot pluggable serial backplane interconnect with automatic discovery, etc. In practice, it'd almost certainly be PCIe. But this has a major cost. It means more silicon and power use in every phone module than is necessary (PCIe uses a lot of power and die area by mobile standards). And this is doubly true if you can't get suppliers interested in building modules with integrated PCIe interfaces. When your camera "blok" has to contain an extra chip to bridge the camera module to PCIe, you aren't in good shape.
"Then tell me about how you plan to make multiple batteries of dissimilar size and potentially different battery chemistry (cell voltage) work together and integrate into any random phone backplane you might buy."
Who says anything about different chemistry and random phones? It is quiet trivial to only offer a single power connector, but build batteries of different physical sizes for this exact phone system. Just because each site has a connector does not mean it needs to be used by the physical block.
Ok, so then the manufacturer has to offer maybe 4 different shaped battery blocks, and the consumer has to buy all of them if we plans to swap some blocks around.
But really, the main question remains: What do you gain by replacing the camera, which occupies maybe 0.5cm^2 with additional battery which occupied maybe 16cm^2? Oh yes, 3% more battery life, that's 20 minutes, if it lasted 12h normally under full load. Wow.
Of course, if you want a larger battery you can go on, and remove the mic, Wifi, WWAN, don't forget the SoC, yeah, you can keep the display. Sorry, that's stupid. Take a look how current smartphones are build, and large the battery compared to the rest is and you'll see there are maybe four blocks: LCD, battery, PCB, camera.
You don't. You choose the battery size you want when you purchase it, you may buy a second battery to keep a spare. And you choose which of the several types of cameras offered you want, with the option to upgrade in the future. So, with the same phone, a customer might buy the skinny battery that makes it extra thin while another can buy a larger, bulkier battery which can endure two days of moderate usage instead of one. Some user might forego the frontal camera, or buy a vga one, while another chooses a 5 MP typical smartphone camera and a third one also adds a large camera with larger sensor and far bigger and better optics, which takes far better photos but also has a bigger footprint (think those Sony camera modules, but integrated into the phone). You also pick the screen size which fits you better and maybe add on peripherals, such as a mini keyboard or a gamepad. You could also go for a standard sim module or get a double, or triple, module, for instance.
This said, I'm not sure it would be a commercial sucess. It's not likely to keep a competitive pricing and I'm not sure carriers want to forgo 1-2 years upgrades.
Ok, so you think of it like a more flexible Moto X, which can be fully customized. More likely to happen than what I talked about, still a big challenge, because the current parts fit to each other, and I doubt that there's much to customize on a phone. Most of the parts are inside the SoC, the rest are mostly the latest and greates tech stuff already. So the only thing I can see to happen soon, different battery sizes sacrificing device thickness, as long as the smartphone is build in a sandwich like structure.
Take a look at the camera module. If you can't find it, it's to the left of the camera window in the rear housing. Yes, that's the whole camera, optics and all. Now take a look at the battery and tell me how you're going to be able to substitute a meaningful amount of battery for the camera."
That is a really good point you made about substituting camera for more battery.
......but what if someone wants to configure a specialized phone that has an extra large camera? By that same logic the camera could increase in size 10X and the battery size wouldn't be affected that much.
Due to highly integrated nature of smart phones, there isn't going to be any sort of platform standardization. That doesn't imply there isn't any standardization. Things like the display interfaces, flash IO, and even buses internal on ARM SoC's are all standardized. This does allow OEM's to swap out parts during the design phase of a smart phone. However, integration wins in the smart phone space without question due to the massive benefits in battery life, physical size and performance.
Yea the testing angle seems the biggest barrier to me... Not only regulatory testing but also carrier testing. You'll need to get AT&T really engaged early on to swing that one (to be fair they obviously have a good relationship w them viz Moto X). J
Here's a question... since I'm not exactly well versed in ARM and SoC in general -- how will the OS adapt to a change in CPU (or SoC)? Let's say we swap a Snapdragon 800 for a Tegra4 or a Tegra5. Is there any architectural differences that could prevent the OS (in all likelihood, Android) from working at all?
I think the OS issues are really just the tip of the iceberg, and they could be overcome. The real issue would be the hardware platform. Smartphones and tablets aren't just designed around an SOC, there are integral platform components such as VR's, platform power management controllers, etc which are designed around the SOC. Many of these parts won't be interchangeable between SOC's. I suppose it's possible that the "CPU module" could include many of these things, but then it would be huge, and furthermore, there may be thermal problems to solve, as you'd be putting discrete power delivery components right next to the SOC, rather than spreading them out over the entire phone, as I would presume is often done in current smartphones.
That's exactly the work that Motorola has to do now, identify which blocks can be separated from the main SOC in a meaningful way. The screen seems to be the obvious first step, but some modules like storage and the SIM are probably connected through a standardized bus anyways.
Even if not, just splitting the system into four parts: (Case, Battery, SOC, Screen) would already allow users to make meaningful updates of their phone without the environmental nightmare that is a full replacement.
Bam. This is where it's at. The original PhoneBloks concept was technically illiterate but that doesn't mean every possible implementation of an idea has to be and there is plenty of room for more refined, practical versions of the concept.
If you gave up on optimization and targeted only the pure ARM APIs, you'd probably at least get something functional with a very basic (aka slow) driver set. I'm not sure how well it would be able to reconfigure to an optimized configuration on the fly.
Power users would probably end up going with something that resembles the Gentoo Linux model, where you compile everything yourself so that it is optimized for your hardware. That's obviously not practical for 99.5% of people, though.
I think you're missing the point: there are no "pure ARM APIs". There exists an ARM instruction set, but everything else is up to the SOC maker. This is in stark contrast to how things work in the PC world: there is in fact an actual x86 platform, which defines not only the CPU instruction set, but also the way that devices get mapped to addresses, the way that the CPU interacts with those devices, etc. Basically, there is no ARM platform, only an ARM instruction set. The "plug n' play" capability that has existed in Windows on x86 for years is essentially not technically possible for ARM SOCS at the moment.
This is the dumbest idea ever. It's astonishing that a major OEM like Motorola would give it the time of day, much less "partner" with yet another wannabe product designer whose main skills lie in making CAD renders of things which are impossible to build. Do they have any engineers advising the marketdroids over there?
For those who have your hopes up, I hate to break it to you but even if they ever ship anything (doubtful), it will suck. Forget about regulatory hurdles, the real problem is that it will be more expensive than conventionally constructed phones, it won't perform as well, it will be less reliable, the software will suck, it will be heavier, and it will be bulky. Oh, and it probably won't be very mix and match in the end.
Google is desperate to have Motorola survive. The new heavily promoted Moto X isn't selling Win Phone very well, and has received so so reviews, on average. Something has to be done.
So this is a radical move. Will they ever manage to come out with real product? It's hard to know. But if Moto doesn't do something major to turn the business around, Google will be taking a $12.5 billion write off. We all know that they will do anything to avoid that. Google isn't a company to admit they did anything wrong.
But like the article, and a number of posters have said, it's unlikely this will be successful. There are too many barriers in front of it. I was a partner in a professional audio manufacturing company, as I look at these things from a design, manufacturing and performance perspective, having designed pro level equipment that had backplanes that modules plugged into.
These devices cost a fair amount more because of the additional complexity. They were also larger. For a very expensive piece of commercial equipment, it makes sense. But for a phone, it doesn't.
Well, sorry kid, but that's exactly how development works. Everybody on the edge of technology is just testing around. We know how to do smartphones of the present now, and nobody knows what smartphones of the future will be like, so every attempt is valid.
And honestly, you think the hardware concept is bad, so you decide that the "software will suck"? Who did you think you would convince with that statement?
Try again. I'm a 40 year old hardware engineer, not a kid. Experience is why I judged that the hardware concept sucks, and is also related to why I "decided" that the software will suck.
A few years ago I got hired by a fabless semi company to work on the first SoC of my career. After that chip taped out, I got to watch how difficult it is to deliver software for a complex SoC, since we're in a market where many customers need the chip and software as a package deal. The chip is somewhat like a phone SoC in complexity except for not having a GPU, and the software we have to deliver is less complex in some areas (no GUI) and more in others (networking).
So I can tell you that it's hard even when the software team has to integrate just one SoC with a small number of off-chip peripherals in a very limited number of configurations. The "phoneblok" concept blows up the number of potential combinations of hardware and software. There is a reason why (to pick the obvious example) Microsoft has to maintain huge testing labs doing WHQL driver certification, and that's just the tip of the iceberg in the PC market.
Since only a tiny number of geeks really want to build their own custom phones out of lego-like "bloks", there's obviously not going to be any entity with the resources (or motivation, same difference) to spend what needs to be spent on software integration engineering. It's not like the PC industry where the ecosystem of interchangable parts grew organically out of the PC's origins in the 1980s; this is an established market where the gold standard is a highly integrated phone, and it's easy to see that the public loves them and for the most part won't switch. It follows that either your choices of "bloks" and how to combine them are going to be very limited, or the software is going to suck. Or (most likely) both.
Finally, the idea that everybody on the edge of tech is just "testing around" is a kid's naive idea of how the industry works. In fact, the idea that this is even on the edge of tech is naive. You seem to nobody knows how to make it work yet, so you just shrug and declare it a valid effort. Actually, my objection is that it looks an awful lot like things that have been done before, and based on past experiences it's easy to predict how this will go without adequate investment. (Which is unlikely to materialize, since ultimately this is a classic solution looking for a problem nobody had.)
I really like the idea for two reasons: I can tailor, and retailor, my own device, and it's less wasteful. As always though, it's the implementation that counts, so it will be dependent providing true choice, quality parts, and a wide spec range so this doesn't become just a "mid level" phone.
Looking how compact todays phones are, this modular approach is likely to become bulkier. Interesting, though, how Microsoft's Surface Pro is basically not repairable, and computers seem to become more "products," while this phone concept sort of goes back to the modular pc idea. There was an Israeli company, Modu, with a similar idea a while back, but that didn't quite hit home. It's all in timing I guess.
Let's be honest here: how many components of a smartphone would you really want to keep when the normal two years are up? Not the display or the cpu, not the camera and most likely not the battery. Maybe some radios and some memory blocks, if they can be used to expand new memory. Considering that they all need to be cased separately, packed separately, transported and all that stuff, the 'less waste' arguments wears kind of thin. And more so if you keep constantly buying new components to update your phone and the old ones pile up in a drawer.
I feel the current model is just smarter, especially if you recycle your old phones, so the precious rare metals can be reused.
If it means one less Nigerian kid wasting its health while burning phones to get at the valuable metal inside? Yeah, why the hell not, I for one sure can deal with a bit less battery life.
I think this falls under the category of something that's easy to make look cool in 3DS Max or Lightwave when you've not talked to any of the engineers that will have to make it actually work.
Interesting from a geek perspective but I can't see this succeeding in the market in any way. Moto X type superficial customization is about as far as that can go and compete on an industrial design level.
Reminds me of the story about Edison and the lightbulb - when he explained that the whole thing was sealed and could not be repaired by the end user, someone said it was a worthless idea. They just couldn't wrap their mind around the concept of building something electical that was so cheap that users would be OK with just throwing it out and buying a new one. This seems to be the opposite of that - consumers seem to be perfectly fine throwing out their current cell phone and buying a new one. Trying to build a modular phone seems to make about as much sense as trying to build a user repairable light bulb.
On the flip side if Google/Motorola is just trying to develop some standards for how stuff interconnects, e.g. some sort of mobile PCIe, I guess that may help.
This is Moto and Google promising something they probably can't and likely won't be able to deliver in order to cast doubt on offerings from their more vertically integrated competitors (Apple and Samsung).
This sounds like an attempt to repeat the commoditization of the PC without recognizing that the world is dramatically different than it was then. For one thing, the whole mobile industry now is much much larger than the PC industry was then. Moreover, price-points are dramatically different. A high end phone is less than $1000 in todays dollars. Your average PC in the early/mid 80's was several times more expensive, didn't have the same space and power constraints and was much much less integrated.
I struggle to think of another mass-market, tech-heavy consumer product that is similarly upgradeable/re-configurable. Perhaps stereo a/v equipment, though that has grown more integrated over time. Maybe some cameras, but even there, the OEM controls most of the platform, and the major costs are the lenses, which don't advance as quickly as electronics.
It is certainly bold, but it seems incredibly unlikely.
Writeup with absolutely no research done. Moto had purchased Modu patents in 2011 which is a Israeli company with similar concept but only for Israel, and it did not work there. So this was done before Moto purchase and possibly one of the reasons for the purchase. So it is not Phonebloks that Moto is copying - it is just leveraging their community. Learn to write unbiased articles Anandtech.
they should do this for notebook. i never that intel think, if they sell notebook this way, i would buy it right away, i think they fail because they give up even before they really try
"In fact, the next generation or product use the same chassis with the same motherboard layout so components such as an LED screen or AC connector jack are interchangeable between the different generation of notebooks."
.....there was always the issue of the MS Windows OS being tied to the original motherboard. (Adding complexity, expense, etc to the transfer process)
With Linux (on a phone), the software doesn't have this limitation. The software (AFAIK) can be easily migrated from one computer to the other.
Google glass is definitely not at the stage where it impresses me. This modular phone concept is even worse. It's like someone woke up and said "Gee, I'd like my smartphone to be an ugly, blocky piece of junk - unlike all of these sleek devices on the market today."
Maybe they'll prove me wrong. But I suspect that if the OEMs really like this, it comes down to cost savings.
If the modular design allows a good amount of niche devices to be configured (from one device) I will be very interested.
For example:
1. Blocks that allow the phone to function better as a camera. (At the expense of something else) 2. Blocks that allow the phone to have better speaker. (at the expense of something else) 3. Block that improves cooling of the SOC so the device has better docked performance when connected to AC power. (This cooling block could take the place of the battery block)
So maybe the "volumetric efficiency" is not the best compared to other general purpose phones, but then I can configure for various purposes while on the go.
I think a lot of people are missing something when they comment on this article saying it cant be done. I accept that there are some technical challenges, and some tradeoffs to be made for this to be a possibility, but lets look at what would actually be required for this to function as intended.
1. You need an operating system that can handle the wide variety of devices that might be embedded into the blocks that would be attached to the frame, and the disconnection and reconnection thereof. I don't know if android actually has any way currently to add drivers once the kernel has been compiled, but Google can certainly add that capability in a future version. Remember this is a Google/Motorola project, the software will be there.
2. You need a frame (endoskeleton in the article) that will hold all the pieces you want to connect. This needs to have a connector for the screen on one side, and connectors for the battery, cpu, and other blocks, on the opposite side. The way that makes the most sense to handle the side with most of the connectors is to have the connectors set up in a grid, determined by the smallest size block that will be mounted to the frame. Lets use a hypothetical grid of 4x10 for a small phone. All blocks would be 1,2 or 4 wide, but height would be any integer smaller than 8. If you limit the battery to the bottom of the frame, you only need 1 connector for power but you can still choose how large a battery you need. Multiple batteries only adds unneeded expense and complexity, while not giving you the capacity of a single larger battery. We can also assume the smallest battery will be a minimum of 50% of the size of the phone. If you also limit the placement of the cpu to a specific location(the cpu will need more connectors than anything else unless the frame acts like an active hub to get data from all the other devices to the cpu), probably near the top to keep it out of the way of the largest battery that can be mounted, you only need interchangeable connectors in a fraction of the total grid area. If you use spring loaded contacts like what you currently see in most phones for sim cards you can make the blocks cover as many connectors as you want, just make the blocks out of plastic. Unused contacts are just ignored. The cpu block would probably need a small built in capacitor to prevent a brief loss of power from causing a crash and reboot. The engineering isnt trivial, but it isnt an insurmountable task either.
3. You need companies to build the add-on blocks for the phone. All the comments seem to assume that the companies who would be doing this would be the current phone OEM's. I agree that some of the phone OEMS would have something to contribute,(samsung for instance makes displays, memory, and cpus for phones) but the companies with the best incentive to make the add-on blocks would be the companies that make things that go into the phones currently. Why wouldnt Nvidia want to sell Tegras, or Qualcom sell their Snapdragons directly to end users for their phones? Or Nokia sell their cameras? Selling components like those directly to end users would have a much higher mark up per unit than selling them in bulk to phone companies. The companies that make these components have never had a way to sell their products directly to end users. They are too dependant on other companies to get their products to end users in a functional configuration. Sure the custom market would be smaller overall, but if they achieved dominance in the custom market, they could use that to leverage more wins in the tightly integrated pre-made phones(More people want our product than the other guys product. You don't want to chose the product people don't want in their phones for your phones, do you?).
Even if this concept becomes real, and I'm not entirely confident that it would, I don't think people are going to like the cost associated in building all of that extra interfacing into a phone. A phone like that would cost more to build than a similarly spec'd integrated smartphone, and people who are too cheap to upgrade every 2 years aren't gonna want to pay for that.
I think google is better off in investing infrastructure to deliver cloud computing, once the infrastructure is there the service provider could just upgrade the servers to provide the users with a better experience, rather than the users upgrading their devices. Chromebooks will be the future... at some point.
This is a real long shot. Remember laptop/PC's. When the manufacturers cannot come together to have a common standard for the desktop/laptop computers then how come they will think cohesively for mobile. Leave aside hardware, even the software requirements vary so widely across platforms that it is a nightmare to develop mobile apps (http://www.techendeavour.com)
Yes, the idea of a modular phone has several challenges. Would a user want a phone that can fall and split into several pieces? Will they have apprehensions regarding the availability of the modules in the market as and when they want? These are some of the queries a customer may have before he buys a modular phone.
Pls participate in this survey to help us understand the mobile phone usage better. We would love to share the insight with Phonebloks and the Project Ara scouts.
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dishayu - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
This is the first thing to blow me away since Google Glass.JoshHo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I'm definitely also excited, but I'm quite cautious in my optimism. Such a project would involve a large number of engineering challenges on top of those that already exist in smartphone design.inighthawki - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Really? Google glass blew you away? I've always seen it as a pretty gimmicky device...steven75 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Blew you away? You must not have used Glass.AkshaySankar - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link
My thoughts exactly.However this does seem to be a really good concept.
raptorious - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
As cool as this concept seems, I just don't see it being practical. smartphones, more than any other device are volume constrained. Most consumers, given the choice between additional battery capacity and more modularity would choose the former. For me, it's just a no brainer. This is all to say nothing of the nightmare that is mobile SOCs. There exists absolutely no standardized platform in the smartphone space as there does for PCs. There are pretty staggering platform differences, even comparing 2 generations of mobile SOC's from the same vendor.ShieTar - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
But a user of a modular phone could put a second battery where the useless camera optics don't need to be.I'm personally looking forward to this, though I assume we won't see anything definitive before 2015.
raptorious - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Not a bad point, but in any case my point still stands: all other things being equal (the thickness of the phone included), you can get modularity or a bigger battery, not bothUngo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I want you to carefully examine this picture of the iPhone 5s completely disassembled, courtesy iFixit:http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/RSVKmYBON...
Take a look at the camera module. If you can't find it, it's to the left of the camera window in the rear housing. Yes, that's the whole camera, optics and all. Now take a look at the battery and tell me how you're going to be able to substitute a meaningful amount of battery for the camera.
Then tell me about how you plan to make multiple batteries of dissimilar size and potentially different battery chemistry (cell voltage) work together and integrate into any random phone backplane you might buy. Apple has boasted about managing to use differing cells on their laptops, where they have all the space in the world for duplicating charge controller circuitry. In a system like this, you'd pretty much have to declare that every battery module must contain its own intelligent charge/discharge controller. Great, so now we have a serious amount of active intelligent electronics in the battery.
That segues into a larger problem, pretty much the fundamental problems with this concept. Ordinary cellphones rely on high integration to reduce power consumption and component count. Many functions are integrated into the SoC, and those which aren't are still pretty tightly tied to the SoC (for example, camera modules talk to phone SoCs through an interface designed just for cameras). If you want to make a "phoneblok" system where any "blok" site can hold a blok implementing just about any function, this forces the use of a generic, standardized, high performance, hot pluggable serial backplane interconnect with automatic discovery, etc. In practice, it'd almost certainly be PCIe. But this has a major cost. It means more silicon and power use in every phone module than is necessary (PCIe uses a lot of power and die area by mobile standards). And this is doubly true if you can't get suppliers interested in building modules with integrated PCIe interfaces. When your camera "blok" has to contain an extra chip to bridge the camera module to PCIe, you aren't in good shape.
ShieTar - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
"Then tell me about how you plan to make multiple batteries of dissimilar size and potentially different battery chemistry (cell voltage) work together and integrate into any random phone backplane you might buy."Who says anything about different chemistry and random phones? It is quiet trivial to only offer a single power connector, but build batteries of different physical sizes for this exact phone system. Just because each site has a connector does not mean it needs to be used by the physical block.
UpSpin - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Ok, so then the manufacturer has to offer maybe 4 different shaped battery blocks, and the consumer has to buy all of them if we plans to swap some blocks around.But really, the main question remains: What do you gain by replacing the camera, which occupies maybe 0.5cm^2 with additional battery which occupied maybe 16cm^2? Oh yes, 3% more battery life, that's 20 minutes, if it lasted 12h normally under full load. Wow.
Of course, if you want a larger battery you can go on, and remove the mic, Wifi, WWAN, don't forget the SoC, yeah, you can keep the display.
Sorry, that's stupid. Take a look how current smartphones are build, and large the battery compared to the rest is and you'll see there are maybe four blocks: LCD, battery, PCB, camera.
juanml82 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
You don't. You choose the battery size you want when you purchase it, you may buy a second battery to keep a spare. And you choose which of the several types of cameras offered you want, with the option to upgrade in the future.So, with the same phone, a customer might buy the skinny battery that makes it extra thin while another can buy a larger, bulkier battery which can endure two days of moderate usage instead of one. Some user might forego the frontal camera, or buy a vga one, while another chooses a 5 MP typical smartphone camera and a third one also adds a large camera with larger sensor and far bigger and better optics, which takes far better photos but also has a bigger footprint (think those Sony camera modules, but integrated into the phone).
You also pick the screen size which fits you better and maybe add on peripherals, such as a mini keyboard or a gamepad. You could also go for a standard sim module or get a double, or triple, module, for instance.
This said, I'm not sure it would be a commercial sucess. It's not likely to keep a competitive pricing and I'm not sure carriers want to forgo 1-2 years upgrades.
UpSpin - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Ok, so you think of it like a more flexible Moto X, which can be fully customized. More likely to happen than what I talked about, still a big challenge, because the current parts fit to each other, and I doubt that there's much to customize on a phone. Most of the parts are inside the SoC, the rest are mostly the latest and greates tech stuff already.So the only thing I can see to happen soon, different battery sizes sacrificing device thickness, as long as the smartphone is build in a sandwich like structure.
Computer Bottleneck - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
"I want you to carefully examine this picture of the iPhone 5s completely disassembled, courtesy iFixit:http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/RSVKmYBON...
Take a look at the camera module. If you can't find it, it's to the left of the camera window in the rear housing. Yes, that's the whole camera, optics and all. Now take a look at the battery and tell me how you're going to be able to substitute a meaningful amount of battery for the camera."
That is a really good point you made about substituting camera for more battery.
......but what if someone wants to configure a specialized phone that has an extra large camera? By that same logic the camera could increase in size 10X and the battery size wouldn't be affected that much.
Mttfer - Thursday, June 26, 2014 - link
Dont be such a pessimist. What they are doing is amazing they will revolutionize smart phones. Also HOW many characters JUST to say they CANT!?!jt122333221 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I think the goal of this project is to create a standardized modular platform though.Kevin G - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Due to highly integrated nature of smart phones, there isn't going to be any sort of platform standardization. That doesn't imply there isn't any standardization. Things like the display interfaces, flash IO, and even buses internal on ARM SoC's are all standardized. This does allow OEM's to swap out parts during the design phase of a smart phone. However, integration wins in the smart phone space without question due to the massive benefits in battery life, physical size and performance.Computer Bottleneck - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
If anyone is interested in signing up to collaborate, here is the website I found for the project:http://www.dscout.com/ara
vekin - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Wait...Phonebloks isn't a joke?
Could have fooled me!
Jon Tseng - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Yea the testing angle seems the biggest barrier to me... Not only regulatory testing but also carrier testing. You'll need to get AT&T really engaged early on to swing that one (to be fair they obviously have a good relationship w them viz Moto X). Jkeitaro - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Here's a question... since I'm not exactly well versed in ARM and SoC in general -- how will the OS adapt to a change in CPU (or SoC)? Let's say we swap a Snapdragon 800 for a Tegra4 or a Tegra5. Is there any architectural differences that could prevent the OS (in all likelihood, Android) from working at all?raptorious - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I think the OS issues are really just the tip of the iceberg, and they could be overcome. The real issue would be the hardware platform. Smartphones and tablets aren't just designed around an SOC, there are integral platform components such as VR's, platform power management controllers, etc which are designed around the SOC. Many of these parts won't be interchangeable between SOC's. I suppose it's possible that the "CPU module" could include many of these things, but then it would be huge, and furthermore, there may be thermal problems to solve, as you'd be putting discrete power delivery components right next to the SOC, rather than spreading them out over the entire phone, as I would presume is often done in current smartphones.ShieTar - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
That's exactly the work that Motorola has to do now, identify which blocks can be separated from the main SOC in a meaningful way. The screen seems to be the obvious first step, but some modules like storage and the SIM are probably connected through a standardized bus anyways.Even if not, just splitting the system into four parts: (Case, Battery, SOC, Screen) would already allow users to make meaningful updates of their phone without the environmental nightmare that is a full replacement.
Spunjji - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Bam. This is where it's at. The original PhoneBloks concept was technically illiterate but that doesn't mean every possible implementation of an idea has to be and there is plenty of room for more refined, practical versions of the concept.A5 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
If you gave up on optimization and targeted only the pure ARM APIs, you'd probably at least get something functional with a very basic (aka slow) driver set. I'm not sure how well it would be able to reconfigure to an optimized configuration on the fly.Power users would probably end up going with something that resembles the Gentoo Linux model, where you compile everything yourself so that it is optimized for your hardware. That's obviously not practical for 99.5% of people, though.
raptorious - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I think you're missing the point: there are no "pure ARM APIs". There exists an ARM instruction set, but everything else is up to the SOC maker. This is in stark contrast to how things work in the PC world: there is in fact an actual x86 platform, which defines not only the CPU instruction set, but also the way that devices get mapped to addresses, the way that the CPU interacts with those devices, etc. Basically, there is no ARM platform, only an ARM instruction set. The "plug n' play" capability that has existed in Windows on x86 for years is essentially not technically possible for ARM SOCS at the moment.Ungo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
This is the dumbest idea ever. It's astonishing that a major OEM like Motorola would give it the time of day, much less "partner" with yet another wannabe product designer whose main skills lie in making CAD renders of things which are impossible to build. Do they have any engineers advising the marketdroids over there?For those who have your hopes up, I hate to break it to you but even if they ever ship anything (doubtful), it will suck. Forget about regulatory hurdles, the real problem is that it will be more expensive than conventionally constructed phones, it won't perform as well, it will be less reliable, the software will suck, it will be heavier, and it will be bulky. Oh, and it probably won't be very mix and match in the end.
melgross - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Google is desperate to have Motorola survive. The new heavily promoted Moto X isn't selling Win Phone very well, and has received so so reviews, on average. Something has to be done.So this is a radical move. Will they ever manage to come out with real product? It's hard to know. But if Moto doesn't do something major to turn the business around, Google will be taking a $12.5 billion write off. We all know that they will do anything to avoid that. Google isn't a company to admit they did anything wrong.
But like the article, and a number of posters have said, it's unlikely this will be successful. There are too many barriers in front of it. I was a partner in a professional audio manufacturing company, as I look at these things from a design, manufacturing and performance perspective, having designed pro level equipment that had backplanes that modules plugged into.
These devices cost a fair amount more because of the additional complexity. They were also larger. For a very expensive piece of commercial equipment, it makes sense. But for a phone, it doesn't.
melgross - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Oops. Auto correct has helped me turn a sentence into nonsense. I didn't catch it.Somehow, Win Phone was inserted into the second sentence. So unless the site is secretly promoting Win Phone, the error is mine.
Spunjji - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
You are completely missing the point here. But good effort.ShieTar - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Well, sorry kid, but that's exactly how development works. Everybody on the edge of technology is just testing around. We know how to do smartphones of the present now, and nobody knows what smartphones of the future will be like, so every attempt is valid.And honestly, you think the hardware concept is bad, so you decide that the "software will suck"? Who did you think you would convince with that statement?
Ungo - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Try again. I'm a 40 year old hardware engineer, not a kid. Experience is why I judged that the hardware concept sucks, and is also related to why I "decided" that the software will suck.A few years ago I got hired by a fabless semi company to work on the first SoC of my career. After that chip taped out, I got to watch how difficult it is to deliver software for a complex SoC, since we're in a market where many customers need the chip and software as a package deal. The chip is somewhat like a phone SoC in complexity except for not having a GPU, and the software we have to deliver is less complex in some areas (no GUI) and more in others (networking).
So I can tell you that it's hard even when the software team has to integrate just one SoC with a small number of off-chip peripherals in a very limited number of configurations. The "phoneblok" concept blows up the number of potential combinations of hardware and software. There is a reason why (to pick the obvious example) Microsoft has to maintain huge testing labs doing WHQL driver certification, and that's just the tip of the iceberg in the PC market.
Since only a tiny number of geeks really want to build their own custom phones out of lego-like "bloks", there's obviously not going to be any entity with the resources (or motivation, same difference) to spend what needs to be spent on software integration engineering. It's not like the PC industry where the ecosystem of interchangable parts grew organically out of the PC's origins in the 1980s; this is an established market where the gold standard is a highly integrated phone, and it's easy to see that the public loves them and for the most part won't switch. It follows that either your choices of "bloks" and how to combine them are going to be very limited, or the software is going to suck. Or (most likely) both.
Finally, the idea that everybody on the edge of tech is just "testing around" is a kid's naive idea of how the industry works. In fact, the idea that this is even on the edge of tech is naive. You seem to nobody knows how to make it work yet, so you just shrug and declare it a valid effort. Actually, my objection is that it looks an awful lot like things that have been done before, and based on past experiences it's easy to predict how this will go without adequate investment. (Which is unlikely to materialize, since ultimately this is a classic solution looking for a problem nobody had.)
raptorious - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Amen. I currently work for a fabless semi company, and I can tell you, integration is enough of a nightmare. "Plug n' play" would be a disaster.willis936 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Now this is interesting. Get Aptina, Qualcomm, Samsung, and LG to sign on and you'd have yourself a story.Gadgety - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I really like the idea for two reasons: I can tailor, and retailor, my own device, and it's less wasteful. As always though, it's the implementation that counts, so it will be dependent providing true choice, quality parts, and a wide spec range so this doesn't become just a "mid level" phone.Looking how compact todays phones are, this modular approach is likely to become bulkier. Interesting, though, how Microsoft's Surface Pro is basically not repairable, and computers seem to become more "products," while this phone concept sort of goes back to the modular pc idea. There was an Israeli company, Modu, with a similar idea a while back, but that didn't quite hit home. It's all in timing I guess.
JensWeissflog - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
"and it's less wasteful."Let's be honest here: how many components of a smartphone would you really want to keep when the normal two years are up? Not the display or the cpu, not the camera and most likely not the battery. Maybe some radios and some memory blocks, if they can be used to expand new memory. Considering that they all need to be cased separately, packed separately, transported and all that stuff, the 'less waste' arguments wears kind of thin. And more so if you keep constantly buying new components to update your phone and the old ones pile up in a drawer.
I feel the current model is just smarter, especially if you recycle your old phones, so the precious rare metals can be reused.
Sunburn74 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Honestly, all I would like would be able to update my cell phone processor as new models are released without having to buy an entirely new phone.easp - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Would you like to have your battery life cut at the same time?ShieTar - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
If it means one less Nigerian kid wasting its health while burning phones to get at the valuable metal inside? Yeah, why the hell not, I for one sure can deal with a bit less battery life.Gunbuster - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I think this falls under the category of something that's easy to make look cool in 3DS Max or Lightwave when you've not talked to any of the engineers that will have to make it actually work.bountygiver - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Hopefully when it comes out the components are not ridiculously expensive.VengenceIsMineX - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Interesting from a geek perspective but I can't see this succeeding in the market in any way. Moto X type superficial customization is about as far as that can go and compete on an industrial design level.jak3676 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Reminds me of the story about Edison and the lightbulb - when he explained that the whole thing was sealed and could not be repaired by the end user, someone said it was a worthless idea. They just couldn't wrap their mind around the concept of building something electical that was so cheap that users would be OK with just throwing it out and buying a new one. This seems to be the opposite of that - consumers seem to be perfectly fine throwing out their current cell phone and buying a new one. Trying to build a modular phone seems to make about as much sense as trying to build a user repairable light bulb.On the flip side if Google/Motorola is just trying to develop some standards for how stuff interconnects, e.g. some sort of mobile PCIe, I guess that may help.
easp - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
This smells like FUD/Vaporware to me.This is Moto and Google promising something they probably can't and likely won't be able to deliver in order to cast doubt on offerings from their more vertically integrated competitors (Apple and Samsung).
This sounds like an attempt to repeat the commoditization of the PC without recognizing that the world is dramatically different than it was then. For one thing, the whole mobile industry now is much much larger than the PC industry was then. Moreover, price-points are dramatically different. A high end phone is less than $1000 in todays dollars. Your average PC in the early/mid 80's was several times more expensive, didn't have the same space and power constraints and was much much less integrated.
I struggle to think of another mass-market, tech-heavy consumer product that is similarly upgradeable/re-configurable. Perhaps stereo a/v equipment, though that has grown more integrated over time. Maybe some cameras, but even there, the OEM controls most of the platform, and the major costs are the lenses, which don't advance as quickly as electronics.
It is certainly bold, but it seems incredibly unlikely.
darwinosx - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Dumb idea even for Google/Motorola.willis936 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Ah yes, google and motorola have dumb ideas regularly. They run a very successful business on dumb ideas. Flawless analysis.Beautyspin - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Writeup with absolutely no research done. Moto had purchased Modu patents in 2011 which is a Israeli company with similar concept but only for Israel, and it did not work there. So this was done before Moto purchase and possibly one of the reasons for the purchase. So it is not Phonebloks that Moto is copying - it is just leveraging their community. Learn to write unbiased articles Anandtech.izmanq - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
they should do this for notebook. i never that intel think, if they sell notebook this way, i would buy it right away, i think they fail because they give up even before they really tryComputer Bottleneck - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Regarding the Intel whitebook initiative mentioned, one problem I saw it having was Windows Licensing.So even if Intel developed an upgrade motherboard that could be swapped into an existing laptop chassis (as mentioned in this link here---> http://www.asipartner.com/ASIAcademy/IntelSpringPe...
"In fact, the next generation or product use the same chassis with the same motherboard layout so components such as an LED screen or AC connector jack are interchangeable between the different generation of notebooks."
.....there was always the issue of the MS Windows OS being tied to the original motherboard. (Adding complexity, expense, etc to the transfer process)
With Linux (on a phone), the software doesn't have this limitation. The software (AFAIK) can be easily migrated from one computer to the other.
Alexvrb - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Google glass is definitely not at the stage where it impresses me. This modular phone concept is even worse. It's like someone woke up and said "Gee, I'd like my smartphone to be an ugly, blocky piece of junk - unlike all of these sleek devices on the market today."Maybe they'll prove me wrong. But I suspect that if the OEMs really like this, it comes down to cost savings.
Computer Bottleneck - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
If the modular design allows a good amount of niche devices to be configured (from one device) I will be very interested.For example:
1. Blocks that allow the phone to function better as a camera. (At the expense of something else)
2. Blocks that allow the phone to have better speaker. (at the expense of something else)
3. Block that improves cooling of the SOC so the device has better docked performance when connected to AC power. (This cooling block could take the place of the battery block)
So maybe the "volumetric efficiency" is not the best compared to other general purpose phones, but then I can configure for various purposes while on the go.
Rogerdodge1 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I think a lot of people are missing something when they comment on this article saying it cant be done. I accept that there are some technical challenges, and some tradeoffs to be made for this to be a possibility, but lets look at what would actually be required for this to function as intended.1. You need an operating system that can handle the wide variety of devices that might be embedded into the blocks that would be attached to the frame, and the disconnection and reconnection thereof. I don't know if android actually has any way currently to add drivers once the kernel has been compiled, but Google can certainly add that capability in a future version. Remember this is a Google/Motorola project, the software will be there.
2. You need a frame (endoskeleton in the article) that will hold all the pieces you want to connect. This needs to have a connector for the screen on one side, and connectors for the battery, cpu, and other blocks, on the opposite side. The way that makes the most sense to handle the side with most of the connectors is to have the connectors set up in a grid, determined by the smallest size block that will be mounted to the frame. Lets use a hypothetical grid of 4x10 for a small phone. All blocks would be 1,2 or 4 wide, but height would be any integer smaller than 8. If you limit the battery to the bottom of the frame, you only need 1 connector for power but you can still choose how large a battery you need. Multiple batteries only adds unneeded expense and complexity, while not giving you the capacity of a single larger battery. We can also assume the smallest battery will be a minimum of 50% of the size of the phone. If you also limit the placement of the cpu to a specific location(the cpu will need more connectors than anything else unless the frame acts like an active hub to get data from all the other devices to the cpu), probably near the top to keep it out of the way of the largest battery that can be mounted, you only need interchangeable connectors in a fraction of the total grid area. If you use spring loaded contacts like what you currently see in most phones for sim cards you can make the blocks cover as many connectors as you want, just make the blocks out of plastic. Unused contacts are just ignored. The cpu block would probably need a small built in capacitor to prevent a brief loss of power from causing a crash and reboot. The engineering isnt trivial, but it isnt an insurmountable task either.
3. You need companies to build the add-on blocks for the phone. All the comments seem to assume that the companies who would be doing this would be the current phone OEM's. I agree that some of the phone OEMS would have something to contribute,(samsung for instance makes displays, memory, and cpus for phones) but the companies with the best incentive to make the add-on blocks would be the companies that make things that go into the phones currently. Why wouldnt Nvidia want to sell Tegras, or Qualcom sell their Snapdragons directly to end users for their phones? Or Nokia sell their cameras? Selling components like those directly to end users would have a much higher mark up per unit than selling them in bulk to phone companies. The companies that make these components have never had a way to sell their products directly to end users. They are too dependant on other companies to get their products to end users in a functional configuration. Sure the custom market would be smaller overall, but if they achieved dominance in the custom market, they could use that to leverage more wins in the tightly integrated pre-made phones(More people want our product than the other guys product. You don't want to chose the product people don't want in their phones for your phones, do you?).
Cptn_Slo - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Even if this concept becomes real, and I'm not entirely confident that it would, I don't think people are going to like the cost associated in building all of that extra interfacing into a phone. A phone like that would cost more to build than a similarly spec'd integrated smartphone, and people who are too cheap to upgrade every 2 years aren't gonna want to pay for that.I think google is better off in investing infrastructure to deliver cloud computing, once the infrastructure is there the service provider could just upgrade the servers to provide the users with a better experience, rather than the users upgrading their devices. Chromebooks will be the future... at some point.
est.rahul - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
This is a real long shot. Remember laptop/PC's. When the manufacturers cannot come together to have a common standard for the desktop/laptop computers then how come they will think cohesively for mobile. Leave aside hardware, even the software requirements vary so widely across platforms that it is a nightmare to develop mobile apps (http://www.techendeavour.com)CreativeInsight.biz - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
Yes, the idea of a modular phone has several challenges. Would a user want a phone that can fall and split into several pieces? Will they have apprehensions regarding the availability of the modules in the market as and when they want? These are some of the queries a customer may have before he buys a modular phone.Pls participate in this survey to help us understand the mobile phone usage better. We would love to share the insight with Phonebloks and the Project Ara scouts.
Here is the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YMC7DJ2
Courtesy: Creativeinsight.biz