Phonebloks and Project Ara – Motorola’s Hail Mary?

The announcement by Motorola last week of the previously undercover Project Ara and their partnership with the Phonebloks community is potentially huge news from a one-time giant, and arguably the creator of the entire cellphone industry.

On 10 September 2013 Dave Hakkens posted a YouTube video and the Phonebloks website, calling for people to back his plan to create a revolutionary modular, upgradable smartphone platform, setting out with the simple goal to reach as many people as he could.

Hoping to get a modest 500 supporters in order to exploit their social reach with a single “thunderclap” of promotion on 29 of October 2013, his campaign ended up with nearly 1,000,000 supporters, a social reach of over 381,777,588 people, and his initial video has been viewed over 17 million times.

Despite that groundswell of support, some people I have spoken to fear an impending slow death of usable hardware due to “design by committee”. Others have criticised the aesthetics, fearing a “Lego brick world” devoid of the minimalist influence of Jonny Ive, yet also bereft of capacity for more outrageous design statements. Some, however, are really, really excited.

Despite cries of “device-mageddon”, if you consider the range of touchscreen smart devices on the market, the variation in form and function is not huge.  Sure, there are lots of slightly different screen sizes and button configurations, but they’re mostly variations on the black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  And under the hood there is also a relatively small number of core chipsets at work.

I suspect that we might well see a small range of “chassis” designs at key form factors – 4″ smartphone, 7″ tablet, 10″ tablet etc. – which can accommodate these modular components, and perhaps even a notional return to simple, swappable cases the like of which existed before we all got suckered into fell in love with machined aluminium mono-blocks with non user-replaceable batteries and built-in 2-year obsolescence.

It remains to be seen just how far Google, Motarola, and the Phonebloks community can take this idea, but if it succeeds, Project Ara could both revive the flagging fortunes of Motorola and herald a bold new era of smartphone design and production as revolutionary as the launch of the first iPhone.