Motorola has revealed its latest effort to shake up the smartphone market: Project Ara, described by the Google subsidiary as "a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones".
It was announced last night in a blog post explaining that Project Ara handsets will consist of a central "endoskeleton" and additional modules created by a range of other developers and companies.
The first Module Developer's Kit will be made available "sometime this winter", raising the prospect that Project Ara smartphones could be on sale sometime in 2014. Motorola is recruiting people to become "Ara Scouts" to help test the devices, similar to Google's Glass Explorer scheme for its Glass augmented eyewear.
"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," explained Paul Eremenko from Motorola's advanced technology and projects team, which is leading the Project.
"Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it."
Eremenko added that Project Ara has been in development for more than a year now, although a six-month road-trip for Sticky – "a truck wrapped entirely in velcro and filled with rooted, hackable Motorola smartphones and high-end 3D printing equipment" – was a key influence on the current shape of the project.
This isn't the first attempt at a modular smartphone. Motorola is already working with Dave Hakkens, founder of the Phonebloks project to create a similar device, where each hardware "blok" is repairable and replaceable.
"We’ve done deep technical work. Dave created a community. The power of open requires both. So we will be working on Project Ara in the open, engaging with the Phonebloks community throughout our development process," wrote Eremenko.
Just as relevant a comparison is Modu, the Israeli startup that tried to get a modular smartphone off the ground in 2008, but which shut down in early 2011. Google reportedly acquired the company's patent portfolio later that year, so Modu's technology may live on in Project Ara.
