News & Reviews:   Project Ara modular smartphone

The modular smartphone known as Project Ara is coming along well apparently as they have confirmed quite a few things, including the board design and some tech specs. For the basic board design, a Project Ara smartphone will use a remodeled Spiral 2 circuit board while the processors will include those from Marvell and NVIDIA. This means we could see a Marvell PXA1928 or an NVIDIA Tegra K1 in upcoming Project Ara smartphones. Functioning prototypes have already been created and are expected to be announced or at least shown off at the Google Developer Conference come January 2015. The team expect that the Spiral 2 basic board will soon get upgraded to Spiral 3 courtesy of Toshiba as well. Still no news yet on other tech specs and features like cameras and displays, much less Malaysia release dates or pricing but more details could come later in 2015.

The Project Ara modular smartphone project has revealed some interesting news. Since the frame has it's own reserve power when the smartphone does come out, you can swap out parts like the battery or memory or storage while the smartphone is on. The only two parts that require you to shut the smartphone off first are the processor and display module parts. Still no news on any Malaysia release dates or pricing but Google have said that the basic kit will start from $50 (RM164). We expect it to come in early 2015 but probably just for the US at first and it will likely run the latest Android L operating system. Check out the video in this article for more details on Project Ara.

While Lenovo may have bought Motorola, the Project Ara modular smartphone remained at Google. Since it was based off of the Phonebloks concept, Phonebloks recently checked up on the Project Ara team to see how far they were going. The visit was documented into the video below which more or less shows that Project Ara is on track to becoming a working modular smartphone. Still no news when that might become a reality but Google has said that the entry-level unit should be priced not more than $50 (RM164), and that developers get the kit for free. The whole Project Ara looks to be quite thorough, right down to a user-friendly interface for non-techies to make their own pick and place modular smartphone, so check out the video in this article.