It has been a long time since Project Ara has been heard, the development of Google ATAP to put on the market a modular phone (with many more possibilities than those currently offered by the LG G5). The case is that in the course of the developer event that the Mountain Viewers have held in San Francisco, it has been learned that there is already a date for the launch to the domestic market: the year 2017.
And, curiously, this information appears after the arrival of Rick Osterloh as Google's chief hardware officer. And we say curious since this manager was in charge of its birth and development of Project Ara at Motorola when this company was acquired by Mountain View a few years ago. Life, sometimes, is at least curious.
The fact is that in the course of Google I / O it has been possible to see a prototype, finally!, Of what will be the company's modular phone and, yes, they have been quick to indicate that the design is far from be the end. But, yes, the functionality is complete and it is possible from changing the camera module quickly and easily to the one that includes the processor or the screen. Therefore, we are talking about a smartphone in which each and every one of its hardware components se they will be able to replace -except for the motherboard in which the rest of the hardware is integrated-.
How is this achieved?
Although it may seem the opposite, the big problem that Google ATAP has found to achieve modularity has not been the compatibility of the elements. The complex has turned out to be finding the Contact that allow, on the one hand, simplicity of use and, on the other, that communication is adequate both in terms of performance and communication in the Android operating system. And, this, once the original idea was discarded, has been achieved using the so-called UniPro, which are similar to metal pins with a slight insertion of the module on the board.
From the Mountain View company it has been announced that at the end of this year 2016 the models for developers will begin to be deployed, although a batch of thirty are already operational, where they will seek to improve and optimize performance such as the design of Project devices Ara. And, all this, with the aim of launching itself into the end-user market in 2017, as Dan Kaufman, one of the top managers of the project, has indicated.
I personally believe that Project Ara can be a very important advance since it allows users, in a personal and simple way, to adapt the mobile terminal they use to the specific needs they may have. For example, it will be possible to change the camera to take photos in specific contexts, for example sports, or use a less powerful screen - or even electronic ink - if you just want to read a book. The options are simply the imagination.