Ara, Google's modular smartphone is finally ready

During Google I/O 2016, there was no mention of Project Ara. Finally, until the last day of the conference. The team behind this project took advantage of the last hours of the event to announce great news for the modular smartphone. It has not been abandoned, on the contrary.

Project Ara is surely the most exciting project for the smartphone market. After years of demos and a lot of uncertainty, an eerie silence, Ara works. Around 30 people within the ATAP lab use Ara as their primary smartphone. It's still a prototype but the Ara team has just communicated some news that should delight fans of the project.

Let's not beat around the bush: the developer kit, Project Ara Developer Edition, will ship this fall, and a consumer version is planned for 2017, next year. Ara is no longer an experimental part of the ATAP branch, the team has formed its own division within Google.

Project Ara, the modular smartphone

Smartphones have an increasingly short lifespan. The reason that pushes us to change smartphones is rarely related to a technical problem or outdated hardware. The development cycles of electronic devices have been reduced, new products are announced every month, Android versions follow one another and technologies continue to evolve at an increasingly sustained pace. And why not upgrade your smartphone by changing the components? What if you embarked on the creation of a tailor-made smartphone?

Google wants to bring innovation to the smartphone world by creating an ecosystem. This ecosystem will be open to all players in the sector, allowing brand new startups to offer new never-seen components, for example. All these components will have their place on an exoskeleton, where it will be possible to modify certain components on the fly. At last year's edition, we saw for the first time a Project Ara smartphone start. This is Project Ara.

Google Project Ara, the modular smartphone At the end of May, I was in San Francisco at Google I/0 2015, and the ATAP team – Advanced Technologies and Projects – had just demonstrated the first prototype…Read more

Last summer, we met one of the French teams in charge of integrating the software part. I invite you to read this article, it will teach you a lot about the issues encountered by the Ara Project. An American manufacturer had even bet on the project, it is Yezz. A project that came to nothing in the end.

Since then, the progress of the project has not been encouraging, until today.

Project Ara Developer Edition, the first of a great series

The Project Ara Developer Edition is expected to ship this fall. It is a smartphone with a 5.3-inch diagonal screen, positioned as a premium product. Right out of its box, it can be turned on and can be used like any Android device.

It is therefore a final product, the basic characteristics of which we do not yet know, apart from the size of the screen and its rear design.

Over the past year, the team has mostly worked to standardize modules, so that developers can actually start designing them. The key point was the redesign of the connectors on the back. The planned magnetization was not enough to maintain the whole thing.

The exoskeleton works with 6 modules, and each can transmit up to 11.9 GB of data per second, in both directions. All with minimal consumption. These modules are much more strategic than the exoskeleton that serves as a framework, they are the most important resources for the success of the project. Google Ara is waiting for developers and various industry players to adopt this product in order to be able to offer a large number of different modules to the general public.

The idea has not changed. Ara was designed like a LEGO, you can literally build your smartphone by placing the modules in the right boxes. Some modules may be hot-modified, which will not be the case for basic modules (screen, processor, battery and memory, for example).

The first Ara device is a smartphone, as Google decided to tackle the biggest electronics market first. But it is worth remembering that exoskeletons of connected objects or tablets will also be designed. Thousands of combinations will thus be imaginable.

This first Project Ara Developer Edition doesn't have a price yet, but it's definitely coming this year. This is already very good news for this ambitious project that could change the way the industry designed mobile devices.

To follow us, we invite you to download our Android and iOS application. You can read our articles, files, and watch our latest YouTube videos.