Father of Android II: A Hardware Comeback The "Father of Android" Andy Rubin is plotting a return to hardware – and he could beat Google's own Android successor Andromeda to market. According to Bloomberg, Rubin, who left Google in 2013, has hired former Android engineers for his new venture Essential, with the idea that a "high-end" smartphone will act as a kind of …
Why is a connector even needed when there is a wireless capability; WiFi, Bluetooth, Zig-Bee and all the rest?
And where a connector may be useful; what is wrong with micro-USB?
When - other than headphones - was the last time anyone connected a cable to their phone other than to charge or power it, or side-load some application from a PC?
The Moto system looks good, and securely attaches modules to the phone... It would be nice if they opened it up to other parties. I just can't see it achieving a critical mass of adoption if it remains proprietary.
At present, there is a speaker, battery, projector and zoom camera available. The system looks mechanically suitable for a physical keyboard too - so if it were open, those of you clamouring for a qwerty could put your money where your mouth is and Kickstart one.
I would also like to see the system extended to digital cameras and laptops - just place camera on laptop and have all photos transferred in seconds (SD cards are limited by the bus, are fiddly, easy to lose and insecure because no camera encrypts them).
Physical connectors negate to need to charge yet another device.
But if the SD cards starts breaking, I can at least replace it. If the internal memory of a device breaks, the device is essentially bricked. That's why I ALWAYS insist storage and battery (the two least durable parts of the device from my experience) be user-replaceable.
And no manufacturer will be interested in an open standard because they KNOW they'll lose control of it, and this is ALL about control (they want to create the next walled garden; otherwise, why give a soaring screw?).
>But if the SD cards starts breaking, I can at least replace it. If the internal memory of a device breaks, the device is essentially bricked.
No reason that the camera couldn't have the successor to SD inside it (XQD cards are based on the PCIe bus). It's just that swapping a card between devices is inconvenient and creates the possibility that the user will drop or lose it, or get fluff and dust in the wrong places. Whilst your experience is that solid-state memory is the first thing to go wrong, my experience is that physical card connectors also are prone to mechanical failure or intermittent issues caused by dusty or dirty contacts.
I didn't fully explain my line of reasoning though: with PCIe speeds, the camera and laptop (or phone) would only have to be in contact for a few seconds - almost a kiss-to-transfer operation. Or a camera can dump photos to a tethered phone as it takes them (so that the photos are stored on an encrypted volume).
More widely, an industry standard power/data/mechanical dock/module system would open the door to some genuinely useful and convenient gadgets.
"I didn't fully explain my line of reasoning though: with PCIe speeds, the camera and laptop (or phone) would only have to be in contact for a few seconds - almost a kiss-to-transfer operation."
Except it's usually the card that's the bottleneck in transfers, not the bus. That's why SD cards have speed ratings like Class 6 and UHS-I. Anyway, most portable devices don't carry a PCIe bus but do support USB out of necessity. SD can be driven by USB, and since USB 3.0 can do up to 5Gbps, that kind of makes the issue moot for most users (XQD appears to be a professional-grade bus for camcorders and ultra-high-definition/lossess still cameras).
I'm not aware of any mobile/phone device in which the internal storage is user-replaceable.
Some devices offer expandable, additional storage. But if the primary, internal storage is borked then the device is toast but you will have remedy under warranty/consumer guarantees which in enlightened jurisdictions (e.g. here in NZ) will not be limited to any arbitrary time frame, but will cover the "reasonable life" of the device.
i.e. if a mobile phone is reasonably expected to last 5 years then if the internal storage is borked within 5 years (assuming the device has not been abused/mistreated etc) then you are entitled to a replacement.
I'd actually like something more akin to a dock connector that would connect to various peripherals such as monitor, keyboard, hdd, and such. As it is there is BT, SlimPort, USB, Miracast but it feels all so clunky, it'd be much nicer to simply drop it on a dock/cradle on my desk and be done. I have hope that USB-C will do it but I have to wait for it to filter down to a reasonably priced phone.
> No, it's on somebody else's computer (DropBox's). It isn't on your Mac until you transfer it there - which you could do from your phone when you got home
In my case, it is on my OneDrive AND on my computer, since it is mostly on. If not, it arrives fairly quickly thereafter. Doesn't DropBox map their cloud to one's hard drive too if desired?
Although, I have the Wi-Fi only switch for my picture uploads (possibly to change since I have 4GB data now).
If my pics were important, I would have the switch on for sure.
"When - other than headphones - was the last time anyone connected a cable to their phone other than to charge or power it, or side-load some application from a PC?"
Need to do it any time I want to access my phone. Bluetooth works about 40% of the time (other times the transfer mysteriously just keeps "failing" no matter what I do even though both devices freely admit seeing the other) and even then I have to manually re-arm "receive a file (you fucktard)" on the PC for every single file I want to transfer.
As for Wi-Fi, that's nice and all but how am I supposed to access anything at all on the phone (unless I want to run an FTP server on it all the time or something)? Yes, Kies Air does exist but has been broken and complaining about an expired certificate or somesuch for years now - and I'm absolutely not installing AirDroid even if it legitimately does need access to all the permissions it wants.
Or I can just forget all that misery and plug in a cable. Yeah, I do hate cables, but so far the alternative is infinitely worse...
"when the established GSM handset vendors ganged up on Microsoft to create Symbian.".
Why do I have this feeling it was Microsoft who "ganged" up (Gates and Ballmer*) on GSM handset vendors. To quote our beloved and "often" reliable Wiki: "With no major competition in the smartphone OS then (Palm OS and Windows Mobile were comparatively small players), Symbian reached as high as 67% of the global smartphone market share in 2006". Microsoft was a latecomer like Apple in handsets.
* Interesting word, "a. A pack of wolves or wild dogs. b. A herd, especially of buffalo or elk". Oh well.
And Symbian, by the time it started to be adopted on consumer handsets, was looking antiquated. It was based around hardware limitations (small RAM, no GPU) that were becoming no longer relevant. Nor was it free of bugs - my mate's N60 got the pint where it would take minute to open an SMS text message.
Hmmm, maybe that's what he did with it. Oh well. He'd been loyal to Nokia for while - he even had a Symbian Nokia 7650 - the first Nokia with a camera - which he left in the pub, leaving naughty pictures of his girlfriend to be found by some of the regulars. This was around 2002, thankfully before the days of Facebook and easy photo uploading.
As the article said, several companies have tried it, and Google itself was working on it until someone told the idiot engineers running the project that it was something no one wants except ubergeeks, and there aren't enough of them to support such an ecosystem.
If expandability is this new phone's main claim to fame like it sounds, it will only succeed if the hardware is awesome and it runs Android, and the useless expandability feature doesn't raise the price or compromise the hardware to any noticeable degree. If it runs some new OS instead of Android, no matter what the hardware can do its minuscule sales will make Windows Phone look like a raging success by comparison!
Implementation Vs Concept.
Project Ara was a test of concept - it was trti g to do too much. LG's system was too proprietary and there was little confidence the system would carry onto new phones, so people were reluctant to invest in the modules. One of modules was a fancy ESS DAC / amp combo - functionality that can be added to any phone with the right type of USB, or indeed Apple's Lightning connector.
It isnt a connector that makes iPhone add-ons a thing, it's the limited number of shapes, making life easier for battery cases etc.
Except it would be inevitably Yet Another Cloud-based Thing which would make it less than interesting as far as I'm concerned faster than you can say "not your data". Actually, a PRIVATE "cloud" (home mini-server) based ecosystem might interest me indeed but nobody in their right mind is willing to do that when they can "monetize" YOU instead. If I were a rich venture capitalist in the mood to play with a startup instead of the wage slave that I actually am, I'd go for an Android compatible ecosystem with iron-clad / granular privacy controls, encrypted _everything_ from storage to comms, and private server sync. It would have to be a "click-through wizard to install" and "no monthly subscription" affair though or it would be guaranteed to fail...
"It would have to be a "click-through wizard to install" and "no monthly subscription" affair though or it would be guaranteed to fail..."
But without at least the latter, there's no revenue to cover the costs, the investors won't be pleased, and the end result is it's guaranteed to fail.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. That's why ordinary people just can't have nice things.
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