News Motorola unveils Project Ara modular smartphone

This phone would be enormous! If you look how closely the components in a modern phone are packed in and around each other you can see straight away how much extra space would be added by putting each component in a separate box and adding god knows how many pins on the bottom.

The other main problem I can see is antennas. Where do you put them? - If the antenna comes with the block then it would be completely the wrong size and in a poor location. If the antenna is not in the block, then how do you add a new one? What about different blocks that could share an antenna? What about big antennas like NFC? do you have another block that sits on top of all the others?

It's a nice idea but I can't see it taking off as the vast majority of people really don't care about upgradability (see lack of microSD cards and removable batteries in new phones), and no one will want a bulky phone just on the off chance that they will upgrade a single component in a few years time.

 

Not really. Check out the iPhone. Three-quarters of its mass is battery. The actual PCB is smaller than a stick of gum. The 4G/WiFi antennas could sit behind the screen, which is the main common component. Bluetooth antennae can be tiny, as Logitech's Bluetooth dongles show.

 

Exactly. It would be much bigger than a stick of gum if the storage, cpu, screen controller and radios were split out into separate boxes as is being proposed.

 

Your logic is flawed.

 

I thought that this was a great idea. It may make things bigger, but in reality probably not that much. I'd really like to see this. It'd cut wastage by a mile

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