Edit; not saying this is a good idea for a phone, but to some extend it would be for a laptop (not ultrabook). Some rugged ones are quite like that.
Modularity often ends up being a _cost_ to the unsophisticated majority of end users. People don't like it in their software (preferring a "complete solution"), nor in their hardware (e.g. cheap integrated hifi versus expensive minority separates).
When was the last time your parents/grandparents upgraded something in their desktop computer?
I upgraded RAM, video card, sound card, added more hard drives, retired old ones. Later on I replaced CPU+motherboard (unfortunately you can rarely just upgrade the CPU).
If you're not lazy, this can save you quite a lot of money.
Phones are nothing like PCs, and will not be for a long time. It would take some crazy engineering to make them lego-like, or even plain upgradeable.
Phones exist as they are as a sealed unit, so if something fails or you want something new, you buy it from the manufacturer or network.
Networks or manufacturers wouldn't want this kind of thing because it would affect their profits, so what's in it for them? What solution is it offering them?
That's before we even get into the engineering flaws...
This solves a customer's problem.
> "Phones exist as they are as a sealed unit, so if something fails or you want something new, you buy it from the manufacturer or network."
This is the problem that it solves. It's obviously a great feature from the manufacturer's point of view.
> "Networks or manufacturers wouldn't want this kind of thing because it would affect their profits, so what's in it for them? What solution is it offering them?"
This attitude makes them prime candidates to be disrupted. If someone can provide a better experience for the customer that solves the same problem that you solve, then you're at risk of being eliminated.
> "That's before we even get into the engineering flaws..."
This is my biggest concern with this project. Still, good on them for trying. A lot of disruptive technology comes from technologies written off as too-difficult or too-complex to make work.
If the network/manufacturer can't make money, that's not a viable solution for anyone.
This does not solve a problem, it creates them.
And the networks should be removed from the device business at all.
So a smartphone that could be assembled and upgraded with full control and root access is idea that I stand behind. And if it forces the carries to compete on services and not lock people with contracts all the better.
See the problem, is that this idea, with today's technology would be more expensive to build than the device it is competing against. (if it was possible at all)
And if you need to go against the network too, it means competing against $200 iPhone5s and the like.
Note that in a modern phone, the screen strength usually is achieved by bonding it to the case, so in practice "replace screen" turns into "take mainboard out of case and place in new case".
Modularity doesn't really help at all with the constant drive to replace working phones with newer, better ones. But there should be an effective secondhand market selling them to the Third world - and there is! No shortage of websites offering people money for their old phones.
Long term, we have to wait for the Moore's law slowdown, and a rise in Chinese manufacturing wages and other costs, before a local western repair industry becomes viable again.
(Apart from all the other issues, phonebloks would turn "Android fragmentation" into a far more extreme version; you can't guarantee that your peripheral will even be there next time you turn the phone on).
Ideally, I wouldn't mind paying ~$100 for a new screen (or any other assembly), but the problem is that the price of replacing exceeds the cost of the part.
One trend is towards purchasing "accidential" warranties and allowing the customer to trade in for a new device if / when something happens. But the issue is that this coverage is at most 2 - 3 years.
Another issue is that in America, for example, most carriers want to subsidize the phones their customers purchase. By doing this, most people don't see the need for keeping an older phone more than 1.5 - 2 years. If the cost of the phone is taken out of the monthly payments and forced upon the customers, this may allow more people to keep phones for a lot longer.
also the video and concepts kept making me think of how hot a big metallic "speed block" would be against my hand
Mirasol on the other hand, has a ton of potential, and it seems to improve the overall battery life of a device by at least 3x (which means the display itself should be many times more efficient than LCD). Too bad nobody has picked up yet (other than Qualcomm themselves [1]) to use it into a line of products, so we can see improvements done faster to it (such as to color accuracy, gamut, contrast, animation speed, etc).
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/09/07/ifa-2013-hands-on-wi...
Otherwise you'll be upgrading memory and camera on a broken phone.
It's a wonderful concept, but extraordinarily hard to pull off. I'm glad he's trying to find partners before any thought of crowdsourcing.
Handwavy on the costs, but modular is definitely more expensive - being able to trick out your phone with bigger memory and large-aparture camera may be worth it to a certain set of customers.
Agree it's a wonderful but hard to implement concept.
I remember when it was physically impossible to fit 32 GIGs of data in my jeans pocket...
1. Blocks are having different sizes. Sure you may have some fillers, but they don't look nice. A light drop could shatter the whole thing (phone must be able to take hits and drops for many reasons)
2. The pluggable architecture calls for the backbone to be some sort of shared bus, example will be I2C, which may not be efficient for high-bandwidth transfer (e.g. camera to memory). A dedicated bus for some modules will just break the 'plugability'. Mitigation could be to zone the backbone so that each zone's traffic is limited, well, that is not simple...
What bus can be used which will be fast enough for all of the components to work together? Sticking a cpu, camera, memory, and screen on the same bus will cause an amazing bottleneck.
How will the components be made to fit in the same thickness? Can you really fit a higher resolution camera in a larger (but not thicker) package?
In that regard, what's to stop someone from making an uber battery which only takes up a few slots but then covers the previous layer on the back, thereby increasing the real estate?
How much force can those pins hold?
Will the bins be biased in some way such that the positive will be every N pins and negative every M pins, and data lines every L pins or something? If so, will the holes be keyed to ensure proper placement?
There are a lot of questions to be answered before this thing can come to fruition, and I think the bus is going to be the biggest limitation. There's a reason this phone doesn't exist yet, as I'm sure hardware manufacturers would love to continue selling people hardware over and over, but there's a genuine problem with bandwidth in this setup where anything can go anywhere.
A better solution would be universal plugs/ports with specific uses for each port. Battery port, CPU port, memory port, and then accessory ports, just like a modern desktop. This would allow the components with the largest bottlenecks to have their own dedicated bus.
The (imho) most important ones in short:
* Mechanical modularity increases size and cost, makes it harder to create a beautiful phone, and is not in the manufacturer's commercial interests. Therefore, it would be hard to find companies/customers to build/buy this.
* Many current components are highly integrated - SoCs, sensor ICs, Display/Touchscreen, etc. Making these modular would require development of many new components (and would increase size, cost, power consumption).
* The concept assumes that all components use a common communication backplane. This is not feasible, as a variety of voltages and communication protocols are in use in a typical phone (I2C, SPI, UART, USB, various display protocols, etc.). Many components need very short connections to the CPU/GPU/whatever without crossing other PCB traces. It is not really feasible to make this work with a generic communication backplane. Proper heat dissipation for CPU/GPU is another problem.
In summary, while it is certainly feasible to build a modular phone (look at David Mellis' DIY cellphone [3]), doing so for current hardware would involve major engineering effort (== design and manufacture dozens of new chips) and would result in less stable, more expensive, and less beautiful phones requiring more power.
Nevertheless, such ideas are certainly helpful to catalyze thoughts about future hardware.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/1m6y1q/that_phonebl...
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m4pmy/el...
[many] http://www.reddit.com/r/all/search?q=phonebloks&restrict_sr=...
It's cool on paper, as long as you don't think about the technical implications. I guess it's a good project marketing-wise.
EDIT: this page is more comprehensive: http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2007/04/24/break-the-laws-o-phy...
* the site does not have anything on it besides a video and an Amazon widget (go for the quick bucks?)
* it is not a real site, but a campaign on thunderclap.it (a new kind of service and really interesting concept )
* the video promotes an idea that you can have a good looking phone which you can customize however you want - who wouldn't want that?
* they let the impression that it's only the petty, nasty corporations that don't want such a phone to exist, just to be able to upsell us more phones and rip off our hard earned money, totally not addressing the technical issues.
What could happen (it already did) - the video and the campaign went viral, so:
* the authors of the campaign get a few thousands of dollars from the Amazon referral commissions
* people hear and see the power of crowdspeaking platforms in action (thunderclap.it)
"Fair" in the sense of "ethically sourced tantalum, etc"; but they've also thought about e-waste and deliberately included a replaceable battery.
Give consumers the option to mix and match enclosures with the cheap electronics that go inside and see what happens.
The growing market for RaspberryPi enclosures stands as proof that it is possible to have many different enclosures, made by third parties, for the same PCB. And that consumers will buy them.
I've long wondered why there should not be a wide variety of enclosures to choose from for various popular small form factor "development" boards. Would such enclosures sell? Why not? The growing number of third party Pi cases being sold is testing that assumption.
I'd even go so far as to guess that if you give consumers great looking enclosures to choose from, you will actually sell more development boards.
For example, water-resistant phones are going to be hard to take apart, and that's a feature that will result in many fewer dead phones.
Packaging for mobile handsets is continuing to evolve. Any modular system would be obsolete long before it breaks even on repairability, upgradeability, etc.
My opinion is that this wasn't thoroughly thought through...
http://www.talkandroid.com/154586-rumor-upcoming-motorola-x-...
> And finally— the mysterious device(s) will be completely customizable by allowing the device’s color, RAM and internal storage to be completely configurable.
