14 DAY TRIAL // Motorola has announced that it’s working on a modular handset that could hit the market in the not so distant future. Project Ara is meant to offer customers an open hardware platform that could be shaped according to their needs and desires.
Paul Eremenko, head of Motorola Advanced Technology and Projects group, describes Project Ara as a “developing a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.”
“We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines,” he adds.
Well, it appears that the prototype is almost ready and it could hit shelves sometime next year. The information has been confirmed over the weekend by Motorola’s CEO Dennis Woodside during an interview with YouTuber Marques Brownlee.
“There is a [Project Ara] prototype and it is pretty close. The idea is you have a skeleton that holds together a set of components and the components slide in and out. If we have the interfaces and the protocols that enable the speaker to speak directly to the CPU then this would all be possible,” said Woodside.
Motorola is now trying to find a universal language for all these modular parts to communicate with one another. Currently, these components inside a smartphone are specific to a device’s design and the US-based company needs to create an open platform for modular components.
TechnoBuffalo reports that Woodside might have hinted to a possible availability of the Ara smartphone through its Moto Maker website.
“Moto Maker was the beginning of a more exciting and longer term story which is how do we involve consumers and give them more choice. Ara is much further out but you can see how those two things tie together and how as we introduce new materials into Moto Maker we’re gonna pursue that theme across our product line going forward.
“What we’d like to eventually get to is [customizing] functionality within the device and that’s where Project Ara and Moto Maker may converge,” said Woodside.
For more details on Motorola’s plans for the near future and more info on the Project Ara, watch the entire interview embedded below.
