Project Ara – Google’s modular mobile creation – has been in
the pipeline for years now, so it’s been kind of difficult to get too excited
over it. We know the major selling point is the opportunity to custom build
your own phone and replace individual pieces, but other than that it’s all a
bit vague. Until now that is – because Google have unveiled their first ad for
Ara.
We’ve
got a release date and location; the phone will be coming to Puerto Rico in
2015 as a “market pilot”. So it may be a bit generous to say we’ve got a
release date, but certainly a release year – this year!
As for
the phone itself, well large parts of the ad continue to tell us the kind of
things we already know – you will be able to add and remove parts as you see
fit, and things such as a broken screen aren’t a phone destroyer as you can
simply slip the old screen out and snap a new one in (which, though we already
knew, is still pretty cool).
The
closest we got to a reveal on what the phone itself will be packing in terms of
modules came in a scene toward the end of the 49 seconds of snapping that is
the ad.
By the look of things Toshiba, Nest, Fujitsu, Kingston and Marvell are all onboard as developers
for Ara. The modules themselves include pedometers, compasses, clocks,
thermometers, keyboards, heart-rate monitors, cameras, speakers, USB ports, gaming
controllers, thermostats, YouTube plugins… Essentially it’s an app store, but
with physical goods you can add to customise your phone.
As to
why they’ve selected Puerto Rico, well Project Ara is being designed for the
lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum – as Google describe it, Ara is
“Designed exclusively for 6 billion people”.
Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States,
however it is also very poor, with over 40 per cent of the population living
below the poverty line (as per Fox News Latino in 2013). This means Google have a
chance to test their product on a population with a broad spread of wealth.
According
to Forbes,
there were a number of other advantages for Google running their pilot in
Puerto Rico:
[Google]
chose Puerto Rico for its strong mobile penetration – 75 per cent of the
population’s initial access to the Internet comes through phones. Puerto Rico
has designated free trade zones where Google can import modules from around the
world. The marketplace for mobile carriers is also diverse with competitors
ranging from local, US-based and Latin America carriers.
Google’s next developers conference for Ara will be
held in Singapore on January 21. Can’t make it? Watch the livestream of the event here.
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