Motorola Ara - a project to create modular smartphones

Motorola has announced the start of the project Ara, under which it is planned to develop modular smartphones, consisting of replaceable elements. Owning such a device, the user can, if desired, replace, for example, a screen, a processor, a photomodule, etc.



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Motorola describes the project as follows: “This is a free, open hardware platform for creating modular phones. We want to do for hardware platforms the same thing that Android previously did for software: create a living ecosystem for third-party developers, lower the entry threshold, increase the pace of innovation, and greatly reduce development time. ”



Ara will work as follows: an endoskeleton (endo) and modules will be created. Endo will be the structural basis on which the modules will be placed. Anything can act as a module: from a new processor to a new display, keyboard, battery, heart rate monitor, or anything else you can think about.



In fact, Motorola has been working on Ara for over a year, but only recently Dave Hackens, the creator of Phonebloks, met with Motorola management. During the conversation, it turned out that the views of the company and Dave largely coincide. Motorola did a lot of technical work, and Dave created a huge community of users dreaming of a modular smartphone. In sum, this is a huge force for the start of open collaboration.

Link to the post from Motorola: Goodbye Sticky. Hello Ara
Link to the Phonebloks project: phonebloks.com