I see these devices being a great success in the 'dev board / arduino / raspberry pi' space. And when they take off there, you'll see tech heads using them as their primary phones. Taking them beyond the projects they'll build around them Will they ever be mainstream enough to compete with the iOS/Android/Windows? Would be nice to see. It would be great if there was an option in the marketplace for people to build and tweak their own device. Power to the people!
can't see how this will ever compete on the phone side - parcelling components in little blocks must significantly increase the space they use plus probably affect latency or cause power problems. hugely interested in this from a home/portable device front though, build a nice lil media server/android & emulations games device to spec which is upgradable if needed - remains to be seen if price will be competitive though
I'll certainly get one if it's done right. It did look prettier in the original phoneblocks video than it does in that picture though
Can't wait to see what comes of this... Even if it's no better than a regular phone and the updated hardware modules never arrive, I love the design!
If it all works out we can have a new sister magazine - Custom Phone. Imagine somewhere down the line a review of a water cooled quad tegra SLI configuration!! On a serious note though if they are doing this with phones then surely this can be applied to tablets too?
I vaguely remember that Phonebloks (An independent company who partnered with Google for Project Ara) wanted to produce three different form-factors of base; a smaller 4.3"-ish version, a 5" phone, and a Larger "Tablet Sized" one, although I can't, for the life of me, find the information, so I could just be making this up. I wouldn't be surprised that if the phone takes off; a Tablet version will follow. The design is fairly clever, and so long as the base is simple enough that it's possible to run things at higher clock speeds without leakage; it'd be possible to just keep upgrading parts on the same base without caring about if it works or not.
