Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
I remember the PC with the "open" ISA bus architecture.
A modular phone that will let you snap on and pull off different components as you wish will finally launch this fall, Google has announced. The Ara project was originally announced in October 2013 and was part of the acquired Motorola Mobility business. Since then it has become part of Google's Advanced Technology and …
Is it much more than a modern version of Nokia's snap-on covers? If not it's pointless.
Options for a modular phone:
flat camera or one with big zoom lens
Swap radio 2g/3g/4g module for new bands or different market or new standard
Swap GPS module
Swap WiFi module
battery for compact phone or big one for long life
Easy replace screen
Clip on qwerty cover
eInk back or cover
Interfaces such as GPIB, parallel, serial, firewire, PS/2, wired ethernet without bottlenect of USB or Bluetooth or SDIO
SD card slot
joypad controller
IR remote controller and reader to learn controls
barcode scanner (cameras only work well with certain codes)
ISO card reader
etc
I may be wrong, but it seems that the devs have just about given up on the modularity thing. The following are NOT modules:
Screen (one of the best things about "old" Ara was that a cracked screen could be popped off and replaced)
CPU/RAM/GPU - If one of these items could do with an upgrade, you can't without getting a new (mostly) phone. Why? Because fuck you, apparently.
"Sensors" - Again, Ara-hyping blurbs kept mentioning the ability to add various esoteric sensors as one of its selling points. Minor issue, but if you want to start picking up Galileo/Beidou signals in a few years - new "phone" time!
This could have been good and useful, but now appears to be a pathetic shadow of its potential.
Well, due to the ARM architecture and the fact the bootstrap needs to know what's there, I suspect modular memory and baseline hardware like the screen are a bridge too far since each new module would change the bootstrap, and ARM hardware isn't (at this time) well-geared for dynamic internal hardware.
To those who are downvoting: show a way you can do with with an ARM architecture (such that you can swap out eveything INCLUDING the CPU, GPU, memory, and screen, and STILL maintain much-needed power efficiency. Oh, AND not break existing compatibility, which last I checked on ARM relies on initramfs which in this case is closely tied to the hardware which on an ARM-based system is usually on fixed, non-standardized memory map?
First of all, all "high bandwidth" components like the CPU and RAM won't be replacable easily, those would have to be in a single module as external connectors would increase the capacitive load which would drain the battery rather quickly.
Then there is a "magic triangle" of connectors. You can make them cheap, small or durable, but not all three at the same time. So you'll either have modules that are huge, expensive or will have connectors that break quickly rendering the module unusable. You can work around this a bit by having low pincount interfaces which are generally cheaper, but this cannot be done for every component.
At best you could hope for a small "basic" device with the screen built in, you could slide into a larger part with extra components like batteries, SDRs or a clamshell keyboard. Maybe that part could also hold the GSM/UMTS/LTE parts since those could be done via a simple low pincount interface.
The linked website shows the connectors, which look like 20 pins, and probably mate with gold pads on the plugin, so should be easy enough to manufacture. It looks like they'll wipe a bit as the plugin docks, so should stay working for a while.
Software wise, it says "Powering this simplicity is Greybus, a new bit of software deep in the Android stack. Greybus supports instantaneous connections, power efficiency and data-transfer rates of up to 11.9 Gbps "
So I'm a bit surprised - that's not USB-anything, I'm guessing some kind of MIPI-alike fast serial bus. However, if it's not something you can easily buy silicon for (or microcontrollers with), it's going to hamper the small volume products. Hopefully, there are other lesser buses on that connector. Heck, a few of I2C, SPI, USB(2), and UART would allow most things you (I) might want to glom onto a nice big display and cheap fast CPU to carry around.
If it requires ASIC or a power hungry FPGA to use, it's less charming. I've still signed up as a dev, why not?
Been rummaging, it's Mipi's (Ex-Nokia's) Unipro -
https://lwn.net/Articles/648400/
Which on one hand is good - it's a proper bus and likely to work, has discovery which might mean plugging stuff in actually works.
On the other hand, it's a pay-for spec, and it's distinctly unfriendly to low volume implementations for bespoke products. Might fit in a moderate FPGA, can't see it fitting in a CPLD. It says you can bridge other protocols (I2C, SPI, etc) over it - if some kind silicon house makes an endpoint that spews those and a bytestream out, like a glorified FTDI FT232H , I think there's more of a chance of 3rd party developers. If not, then modules are going to have to be standalone power leeches or chips that speak Unipro. If this is the start of a common bus for embedded Android products, with discoverability and software that doesn't suck, maybe it's the start of something good. Well, as good as embedded Android can be.
Or, more likely, it's going to fizzle out in a heap of whining that you can't upgrade the RAM, or they picked the wrong screen, or Apple didn't make it. Sigh.
"Or, more likely, it's going to fizzle out in a heap of whining that you can't upgrade the RAM, or they picked the wrong screen, or Apple didn't make it. Sigh."
Seen this happen with many a product so that we always seem to end up with the least common denominator technology.
"However, if it's not something you can easily buy silicon for (or microcontrollers with), it's going to hamper the small volume products. Hopefully, there are other lesser buses on that connector."
Maybe each module just needs cheap and simple power connections and then each device would have a WifI, active RFID or bluetooth and it would all work over a micro IoT wireless network. Simples!
Jeans - check
Surfboard - check
Guitar - check
Twenty-somethings - check
Beards - check
Gender & sexual diversity - check
No actual information - check
They do seem to have found a way to make advertising even more patronising than when a man in a suit simply announced that 8 out of 10 women preferred it.
One of my favourite products for teaching kids programming is Kano, but visit the website http://kano.me/ and see if you can quickly work out which apps the distribution provides to teach programming.
Useless website for forwarding to a teacher give them a quick overview of how they could use it in the classroom.
In theory a fine idea, in practice it means carrying all the small extensions somewhere in a bag (and losing them all the time) or adding a planning phase to the morning routine.
"Am I going to photo someone, or do I want an hour longer battery life? Or am I going to need speakers for showing that cat and my baby video? But I need the battery... And I shouldn't change things often, or else retention mechanism will wear out" Choices, choices... Kill me.
I am really not enough of a nerd to like it.
"I can't see the average consumer adopting it either because there will inevitably be a price premium over a cheap but 'good enough' phone from other manufacturers."
Especially when your average consumer can pick up a "good enough" smartphone for 25 quid from Amazon or Argos. Most nether know nor care if it's the latest "foodstuff" version of Android or if it can be upgraded.
It might be, but if it does end up (moderately) popular in the end, I predict it will be because some out-of-the-left-field but unexpectedly useful / popular modules(s) that you just can't get on typical phones, and not because of the traditional types of modules currently envisioned.
Oh, yes. Because Apple invented the big touch screen on the iPhone.
Really? The Steve Jobs reality distortion field still bending history even after his death I see.
The first iPhone had a tiny screen. Like all the other phones at the time.
And it didn't have the first touch screen...
Compared to the phones of the time it was pretty big. Before the iPhone came along, iPhones tended to have small screens with those jog wheels. Plus most phones on the market were feature phones. Finally, the other touch screens were single-touch resistive where the iPhone was the first mass-market phone with multi-touch capacitive, meaning they set the trend for things like two-fingered scroll and touch-to-zoom.
This is NOT what they promised. This is a base module with everything that makes it a phone, and some slots to add some extra stuff such as a camera or such, and possibly an extra display on the back of the phone... wow, much display, such useful, etc.
Here's a short rant I wrote on the matter:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-design-requires-breaking-laws-physics-ari-kolbeinsson
Adopters of this will find very limited availability of modules, and I'd fully expect that this will do about as well as Amazon's attempt at a phone. I expect within a year, users will be left high and dry and any parts you can find will be on ebay.
One nice thing though is if you crack the screen, it looks like you can just snap on a new one? If you can't, that would show an amazing lack of foresight. I also wonder how expensive the modules will be? I doubt the average smartphone user will be able to afford a drawer full of them. I also wonder if any verification that the add-on hardware is 'authentic' and unadulterated is done.
The first widely-sold Ara will quickly be renamed 'Ara 1.0' as soon as they announce 'Ara 2.0' 12 months later. 'Are 2.0' modules will, of course, be perfectly incompatible with 'Ara 1.0' because they have changed the connector.
An upgraded 16 Mpix camera module will sell for $189.99, and will require an upgraded CPU module that sells for $349.99. This will bring your Ara up to date, at least camera-wise, with regular phones costing about $300.
Mountain climbing enthusiasts will be frustrated to discover that both the GPS module and the Barometric Altimeter module want to occupy the same Top Left position.
First of all: @jzl - have that missing upvote.
Yes, there is reason for pessimism - all that "Ara 1.0" stuff is probaly true, as is the price point and availability of modules.
Initially. Just as the Android Phones of the 1.x and 2.x era were everyone's laughing stock.
Now just think of "Ara 2.0" developing enough critical mass, that millions of busy hands in Sheng Zhen start producing modules the way they are now producing perfectly usable throw-away phones, most possibly after Mediatek created a Mipi-to-sane component, that is cheap as .. ah .. chips.
Think of being able to physically unplug your GPS - let that sink in for a moment.
Think of being able to unplug everything and attach a 10.000 mAh battery instead.
IMHO the success of this idea is not to be measured by the $999.99 enthusiast camera module made by Leica, but by the $9.99 gadget module made by Hing-Fang-Ho. Sheng Zhen has forced the big players to actually give us something for our money, why should they not be able to repeat that stunt?
The pirate icon, because maybe a tiny fraction of that Mipi-to-sane chips might not actually be fully licensed.
Because the pessimism is justified. Assuming it actually reaches market at all, it will quickly sink without a trace. You can't make individual modules in low quantities cheaper than an integrated phone that would be produced in higher quantities. Especially now that you can buy quality Android phones for under $200.
There are so many Android phones out there you can get pretty much anything you want. If there were rapid improvements in technology to where you might say "boy I sure wish I could upgrade the camera in my two year old phone" then maybe it would have a future, but the improvements are very small year to year these days and have been for several years already.
It is a fantasy to think someone is going to create say a DSLR camera module for this, if they do it will cost a fortune because they'll be lucky to sell a thousand of them.
This is the epitome of what Google's dorky PhD engineers would come up with - something only a dorky engineer could ever love or want.
There will be serious problems with the pieces staying together when dropped, or they'll be difficult to pull apart/put together, or there will be strange errors because the pins don't fit together perfectly. Look at how many people drop their phones and see the battery and/or back cover go flying. Those are a lot easier to make sturdy than something with a bunch of delicate electrical connections between modules!
Something will go wrong, there will be a lot of bad publicity and initial promises from Google to fix it, and then it will sink from sight. Though again, that's if it ever comes to market at all. The fact it was announced three years ago and it still is at least a year away from reaching the hands of consumers tells me it is more likely than not this gets pushed back further and further until it sinks without a trace when sanity prevails somewhere at Google that this is something with such a tiny potential audience there will never be a thriving market for modules that they promise.
"There are so many Android phones out there you can get pretty much anything you want."
Nope. There's a list further down that sounds much like my personal wishlist - many of which probably would never hit volume (but I'm a hardware guy and can roll my own if I really want).
Fore more conventional businesses - how about:
A trusted data silo with back-side (not through the phone) authentication? Compromised phone (it's Android...) won't pwn the module, which is owned by the company.
PMR / dPMR module for site PTT
A 5W speaker to piss people off with on public transport / be useful in loud environments
A jogwheel. I miss jogwheels. Come to think of it, many UI input devices.
A little flip-out stand. Ears that stick out when it rings. All sorts of toss that you & I don't want, but other people might.
No, there's not an android phone for everyone, and there never will be. There are tolerable devices and compromises worth making - but I don't see this as dead in the water. Plenty of things would be better closely coupled to the phone, not hung off BT or OTG.
.
Someone above mentioned keeping track of add ons. When I go anywhere for a few days, currently I carry a large laptop, a couple of multimeters, a DSO add on, a development debugger programmer, and a few other odds and ends.
There must be several million hobbyists and designers by now doing things with Arduino, Pi, general microcontrollers, wireless and [whisper it] IoT. Then there's field engineers and the like.
The modules I want to see are:
FLIR - the Cat S60 looks great but is very special purpose and the add on for the iPhone is awkward
Low light camera, prerably one to which I can attach a C mount lens
Multimeter - may bulge quite a lot but so what
DSO - also may bulge a bit but could use SMB connectors
Logic analyser
Substantial SSD
pH meter
Laser or ultrasonic rangefinder
OBD-2.
spectrum analyser
Large battery to power all of above
Wireless gadgets would rapidly run out of bandwidth, and I don't know how well USB-C would handle multiple connections, not to mention all those wires. This thing can hold 6 modules, that's enough for a very useful little development lab.
The CPU and the display don't worry me too much; the 820 is more than adequate to run this kind of stuff and Android N allows multiple windows. In any case the value of the modules will greatly exceed the baseplate. Most instruments don't need lots of memory or all that much compute power.
As I say, millions of potential customers. If as a result I can lug around a small bag instead of a large briefcase I'm pretty much sold.
No offence, but by the time you crammed all that into a single phone, it's the size of a 3.5" HDD, at the absolute very least. I'm not quite sure why that is better than standalone instruments than can potentially be accessed through a traditional smartphone - as long as you're carrying the "large battery" (=external LiPo power brick) anyway, the difference isn't much; the volume is the same, whether you duct-tape it to the phone or not. Not that I wouldn't like to have all that with me - but if it makes the phone the size of a Fluke portable, I have a problem...
A whole whack of detachable bits stuck together, bouncing around in your pocket, purse, or in a cubby in the car?
Good luck with that.
The ongoing success of products like the Otterbox Defender are proof enough that this tech is not rugged enough for many people.
At least my Moto is more or less one solid block of stuff, with nothing to shake loose.
Until I added the Otterbox I was averaging one phone a year.
I can't see this lasting three months.
Haven't looked into the implementation, but I like the concept. There is no phone on the market today that has the combination of features I want. Being able to put together a phone that suits my very particular needs sounds fantastic in theory.
I am worried that in practice this won't really be very modular. After all the SoC and the screen are a large part of a smartphone, and comments seem to imply these are *not* modular. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
It appears to be trying very hard to not show you the product. This will be because although they think the product is cool, it looks like something your two year old made from stickle bricks. And that matters to cool people.
Also the modules appear to be held in with magnets or little plastic tabs. Hard to tell but I doubt it would last 5 minutes in the back pocket of that woman doing the cross country run.
I can't see this as a successful mass market product .. but maybe in specialized/closed markets it might succeed - like a field service engineer's phone/diagnostics link, or issues as corporate phone with approved (ie no camera, no removable storage) modules ... and of course the inevitable hobbyist and tinkerer market