So you might have heard of this little tech startup called Google. Well, it's got a new idea for a phone. But not just any kind of phone.
You see Google's looked around at the last six years of smartphone design progress, from practical but dull multi-ported devices to hermetically sealed handsets of pure beauty, and decided to throw it all away.
Instead, it wants your future smartphone to be modular.
Project Ara - Google's working title for the endeavour - was announced in October last year, to a fair bit of scepticism.
Yet now that the first prototypes have been shown off, along with a lengthy document explaining how it will work, there’s a very good chance that this could be the most significant and popular of all Google’s hardware projects.
And given that this is the company which brought us self-driving cars, a photograph of every single square metre of almost every street on Earth, personal heads-up displays and universal internet access delivered by dirigibles, that's saying something.
So What Is It
Project Ara is a concept for a modular phone handset which Google says it will be able to get on sale in January 2015.
At its heart, an Ara handset is a simple metal frame known as an 'endo' (short for 'endoskeleton'). These come in three sizes – mini, medium and large – which have grids of 10, 18 and 27 square spaces on the back, arranged in groups of 1, 2 or 4.
The front of an endo accepts a removable screen, while modules will be available to fill the slots on the back. So owners can fully customise their phone by adding in a 4G modem, for example, or a 5GHz WiFi module, or removing things that they don't use such as a fingerprint reader.
More experimental phone owners might even look to add pico-projectors or remote controls, while the potential for adding in medical sensors for specialised use hasn't been overlooked either.
WHY MODULAR?
A fortunate accident just before the first Ara Developers Conference made the benefits of an Ara handset clear.
The night before the first functioning prototype was due to go on stage for its debut, someone dropped it and broke the screen. But, as Project Ara head Paul Eremenko joked during the presentation, once the phone is on the market, it'll be a simple matter to replace the screen by swapping out the front module for a new one.
The same is obviously true for any other modules - if you're a big photography fan, and a new camera module is released, you'll be able to upgrade your phone without getting a whole new body; if you're a power user and want extra battery life, just add another one.
The Ara team say that this means less waste, and since parts can be updated rather than thrown away the average lifespan of a phone will increase from two to five years. The downside, of course, is that modular components may end up costing more than a mass produced all-in-one (although Google is aiming to produce a basic handset for a very reasonable US$50) and may not be as robust.
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