Today was a rough day. From about midnight last night until about 5 this afternoon, I was without a phone. No texts, no calls, no browsing, and most painfully, no games at all. It was awful. However, one of the good things about my particular phone is that my problem was a relatively easy, inexpensive fix for my problem. I paid a company $50 and they came out, got my phone, repaired it, and brought it to me. (I can’t recommend Phone Falcon enough for folks in the Louisville area.) The only thing that stopped me from replacing the part myself is the fact that my phone case is impossible to open without specialty tools. That might be changing.
Google has been working for years on Project Ara, a pie-in-the-sky idea for a modular smartphone. Meaning, if you want a better camera, you buy it and put it on your phone. If you want different speakers or a different screen, or a new battery, you simply pop off the old part and replace it with the module you purchased. The smartphone frame itself is the central piece, but it can be augmented in any number of cool ways. Even better, it’s being moved from Google’s skunkworks to actual production!
“It will be thin, it will be light, it will be beautiful, and we’ll launch it next year,” said Google’s Richard Woolridge at the company’s yearly IO developers’ conference.
