Google’s Project Ara is looked to be the revolution in the Smartphone industry. And now, the company is taking one more step to make this real in less than a year, by putting up a Conference, exclusively for the project. This would open up a lot of opportunities for the developers and hardware enthusiasts.
Revolution in what way?
Smartphones are considered to be a smaller version of the computers. But cons are high in a smartphone, overcoming issues led to this new evolution. A smartphone comprises of many possible parts,when a part malfunctions or goes wrong the complete set has to be replaced. The project Ara of Google works with a smartphone which has tile like physical structure,wherein each tile corresponds to a particular component of a regular smartphone.
Getting new phones after an attractive feature has become a habit.Technology never ends, so how many handsets can we actually buy? What if your phone can be updated to latest features without getting the whole set replaced?
This is actually the basic idea behind the Google’s project Ara. Say our camera part of the phone has encountered a problem, you can just replace the tile part which holds the camera part rather than changing your whole smartphone.
Another small example can be our RAM, we use smartphones with fixed RAM- imagine a 512 Mb RAM in a 16GB storage mobile.It becomes a total failure. This project Ara helps you to fix this problem by just changing the part of the RAM in the tile thus reducing the e-waste.
The first Project Ara conference was held this month in the Mountain View,California. A prototype of the smartphone was introduced among the developers and seminars over Industrial design,Manufacturing,Power supply,System and Software happened. Google’s best strategy was extended also to this product, the Module Developers Kit(MDK) was announced an Open source software.
Project Ara’s team showed off a few examples of the design possibilities in the conference.
For example, users can import photos into Ara’s Configurator, which will create a personalized design based off of the color palette in the images. Or, they can crate customized 3D-printed textures for the surface of their device’s modules. These textures, which can only be placed on the top surface of modules, are designed to be easily replaceable, so users can swap them out when they want a new design. The Android update will be announced prior to the Release of the phone in the market.
Unlike typical smartphones, which most users tend to replace at least once every two years, Eremenko,head of project Ara said Google expects Ara’s devices will last between five and six years.