mercredi 9 juillet 2014

Modular smartphones - the future?

Google is working on developing a modular smartphone. Instead of having the phone designed as a single item, it would be made up of various modules slotted together. As upgrades become available, you could simply replace one part at a time instead of having to bin the whole thing and buy a new one, plus there's a huge amount of customisation possible not just for colour, but for actual hardware. Instead of having to choose between phones with fixed combinations of camera, storage, battery, connections, and so on, you could just mix and match whatever parts you like.



It currently doesn't actually work. This is a prototype that's only been in development for less than a year so that's not too surprising, but the idea certainly seems to have potential. There are obvious benefits for repairability, since you'd easily be able to replace just the broken parts. For the environment, which was the original motivation behind the idea, it seems promising. People mostly upgrade to new phones every couple of years because that's just how phone contracts tend to work. If people had the choice of upgrading parts when they actually needed upgrading, it would probably happen a lot less frequently - note that people don't actually upgrade PCs every few months just because there are new parts available.



There are some downsides. At the moment, there's a ton of wasted space just making the modules able to fit together and talk to each other. Obviously they're working on minimising that, but it will never be as efficient as designing the whole thing as one device. Similarly, it takes power to get them talking to each other, with each module needing its own processor. There's already some power and processing needed for connecting various parts, but again it seems likely the modular system will be less efficient. Obviously waterproofing will be a lot more difficult for this kind of system. Durability could go either way. Having your phone explode into its component pieces if you drop can certainly be annoying, but the energy used to do that is energy not being used to actually damage things, so this could easily end up being less prone to damage even though it superficially appears the opposite.



Finally, on the philosophical side of things if this does take off it seems it could fracture the phone market into two almost entirely separate markets. Current smartphones are basically consoles - you buy one device from one manufacturer, and they all do basically the same things in the same ways. A modular smartphone would be a PC - you buy different parts to build it from whichever different manufacturers you feel like, and everyone's device ends up being a bit different with different capabilities. The difference being that consoles and PCs have existed alongside each other for pretty much their whole existence, whereas this would be introducing PCs into a world that currently only has consoles.



So, any thoughts? Are modular phones ever likely to take off in a big way? The future of smartphones, just a silly gimmick, or the start of a new console/PC-type war where neither side really dominates?





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