Fairphone vs. Project Ara: who to bet on at this point?

Posted on by Jules Wang

Furniture. Cafeteria food. Swiss army knives. All of these, when done well, can be a success when made modular. Well, we’re watching two companies as they try to make pieces of the smartphone: Dutch outfit Fairphone and Google-managed development effort, Project Ara.Fairphone has already released a first iteration of its device with the Fairphone 2 on the way. Ara’s still in the larva stage with test markets only staring to get first-wave parts. But each ...

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Fairphone 2 intends to teach Project Ara how to do modular right

Posted on by Jaime Rivera

We’ve kept a close eye at Project Ara over the last couple of years, and yes, we did say years. This project was born in Motorola, adopted by Google, but has taken for ever to launch to consumers. Modular smartphones have been a dream of many of us for years, and a new company plans to provide a better solution.Fairphone is a dutch startup that already garnered some fame a few years ago by crowdfunding a smartphone ...

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Is Google really betting on modular phones, or is it something more?

Posted on by Joe Levi

We’ve covered Google’s Project Ara in the past. To recap, it’s an experiment Google is undertaking wherein our smartphones (and perhaps someday our tablets, too) are built the same way many of our desktop computers are, with modular components. Currently, Google is promoting a skeletal framework and set of protocols and standards into which individual components can quickly and easily slide into place. Want more RAM? Buy a new RAM module to replace your old one one. Want a better camera? Buy a new camera module. It sounds ...

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Project Ara market pilot coming to Puerto Rico this year

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

The last few weeks have seen a flurry of newly invigorated Project Ara activity, the Google ATAP effort to create a modular smartphone hardware platform. We heard about the new Spiral 2 system design, the sort of SoC options that would ultimately arrive, and Google’s plans for the next Ara dev conferences. Those get started today, and the first ...

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Google confirms NVIDIA Tegra K1 as Project Ara SoC option

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

We’re just about one month away from the next Project Ara dev conference, where Google is sure to have plenty to announce about its work towards the first commercially focused, highly modular smartphone hardware platform. We got a little taste earlier this month as imagery of the next-gen Ara prototype board was published, and this week Google’s got some more Ara details to share, as it reveals what sort of processor ...

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Brand new Project Ara prototype hardware emerges

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

The past few months have seen some pretty solid progress towards the dream of a fully modular smartphone, and back in October we got a look at an assembled Project Ara prototype handset booting into Android. The arrival of that news also brought with it word of the next Ara dev conference, set to get underway in mid-January. Among the topics we’ve been looking forward to for coverage there is the reveal of the next-gen Ara ...

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New Project Ara competitor aims for 2015 launch

Posted on by Rithvik Rao

It seems as if modular phones are the next big sector to explode in mobile. Just recently, we heard the moonshot idea proposed by Phonebloks, that perhaps instead of switching phones so often we could just swap out parts in our current phones. After all, certain things like the display, casing, and camera you might not want to upgrade from generation to generation, thus saving money and resources. In that vain, Project Ara came into existence, and after that a few startups decided to work on their own takes on it. Enter Puzzlephone, the latest of the Project Ara competitors to come into ...

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Project Ara soon won’t be the only modular smartphone on the block

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

Modular smartphones are coming! We’re just a couple months away from Google’s next Project Ara dev conference, when it intends to not just show off the very latest Ara prototype hardware, allowing users to customize their phone’s layout by adding and removing interchangeable hardware modules, but also share news of how and where public sales of the first Ara phone will begin. So by this time next year, you may well find yourself upgrading your smartphone’s camera not by purchasing a ...

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Fully assembled Project Ara prototype shown booting Android

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

It’s been about a month since we last checked in with Project Ara, that Google effort to create a fully modular smartphone built around a set of interchangeable hardware modules. Even in the absence of a lot of updates, this is one phone we’ve been keeping in our thoughts, especially as we approach the end of the year; after all, we’d previously heard that Ara hardware could go up for sale in very early 2015. Today ...

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New Project Ara details arrive, fully functional prototype teased

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

Depending on whom you ask, Google’s Project Ara may be primed to change the way we look as smartphone hardware forever. The modular system seeks to give users unprecedented levels of control over the kind of hardware they want making up their phones, but tons of questions remain as to how practical Ara might really be. We’re still a few months away from a retail launch, but for the first time in a while some fresh Ara news has hit our desks, as Phonebloks posts some hardware and software details.For one, we get confirmation ...

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Google getting ready to distribute Project Ara dev boards

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

Google’s Project Ara is such a drastic departure from the hardware designs that make up mainstream smartphones that it’s pretty impressive to see just how swiftly progress is moving forward on the effort. From the earliest announcement back in the fall of last year, we’ve moved on to developer conferences and the release of the Ara Module Developers Kit. Now it’s nearly ...

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Project Ara lead designer departing Google

Posted on by Jaime Rivera

Project Ara has become one of the dreams that could solve the needs of a specific nice in the smartphone market. To give customers the ability to swap specific parts of a smartphone in order to have personalized upgrades is a cool idea, though the fact that this concept has lost popularity in computers makes us wonder if the concept has a future. Still,

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Project Ara processors to be made by surprising manufacturer

Posted on by Rithvik Rao

One of Google’s ongoing ambitious projects is Project Ara, the modular smartphone letting you swap internal components at ease. One of the questions surrounding the project lately has been about which companies will sign on to deliver parts for the smartphone, and we are finally now seeing some news regarding this. Toshiba ...

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How Project Ara might revitalize the smaller smartphone

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

The whole point of Google’s Project Ara is to give users more control over their phones’ hardware: no longer would shoppers be constrained to the prefabricated designs chosen by OEMs, and instead would enjoy untold freedom in combining a number of feature-packed modules with an endoskeleton frame. With the release of the Module Developers Kit early last month we got a great look at some of the configurations that might be possible with the Ara ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 093: NEVER SETTLE

Posted on by Michael Fisher

The “flagship killer” that demands that you “NEVER SETTLE” breaks cover. The pioneer of the modern mobile browser shares his story. And at long last, Microsoft and Nokia finally consummate their love. We could have a feature segment, but with news this hot, do we really need one? Not with a guest like Stefan Constantinescu of TabDump to bring some flavor (and profanity) to the proceedings, that’s for sure. A word on the language of this episode: we’ve recently ditched the “Clean” content rating that’s been with us from the start of ...

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