Motorola rolls out Project Ara, customizable smartphone effort

PanARMENIAN.Net - Motorola has announced a new initiative to help smartphone users take handset customization beyond ringtones and wallpaper to its very form and function, CNet said.

The Google-owned handset company on Monday, October 28 announced Project Ara, a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. An endoskeleton, or structural frame, holds the smartphone modules of the owner's choice, such as a display, keyboard, or extra battery, among others. The approach should allow users to swap out malfunctioning modules or upgrade as new innovations emerge, providing a handset that lasts much longer than today's smartphones. "Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones," Motorola wrote in a company blog post. "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."

In the works for more than a year, the project recently partnered with Dave Hakkens, the creator of Phonebloks. Although still largely in its infancy, Phonebloks build-your-own-phone approach has garnered plenty of interest online, with nearly a million people signing up to support it.

"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," Motorola said in a blog post.

The project plans to begin inviting developers to create modules for the platform in the coming months. It also expects to release an alpha version of a module developers kit this winter.