Google’s Project Ara is steadily making progress and the folks from Phonebloks recently paid a visit to NK Labs, a contractor working on the device’s prototype for Mountain View. The engineering firm sat down and talked about some of Ara’s recent developments, along with the challenges that come with taking on such a complex project.
The idea of being able to modify and upgrade your phone’s hardware as you please almost sounds too good to be true, but Project Ara aims to offer just that. But in addition to being able to pick and pull your device’s camera and battery, the director of Google’s modular smartphone program, Paul Eremenko recently revealed that you’ll be able swap even more modules around.
It seems as if Google’s Project Ara modular smartphone project is coming along nicely, despite a few manufacturing setbacks. There was apparently a problem with manufacturing devices for those who won units at Google I/O, but Google yesterday announced some exciting developments: the third iteration of Ara is planned to sport a custom-made system-on-a-chip made in collaboration with Rockchip, which is going to be made with the unique form factor of the device in mind.
Back at Google I/O, Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects team showed off the first booting prototype Project Ara device and teased that the first units would be available to developers later this year. Today, Google announced that 100 members of its Ara Scouts program will soon be the recipients of the first Project Ara devices. In a post announcing the closure of the Ara Scouts program, Google said that the lucky 100 people were chosen based on how often they participated in the Scouts program.
Dan Makoski, Google’s head of design for its Advanced Technology & Projects division is leaving the company and taking a design related position at Capital One. Yep, the bank that has star-studded credit card ads powered by celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Samuel L. Jackson. So why leave a bleeding edge tech company like Google for life at a financial institution? Makoski recently drafted a list on his blog explaining his decision.
During a session at its I/O developer conference today, Google announced that it’s partnering with LG to build a tablet that’s part of its Project Tango program to release to consumers next year. Google earlier this month announced that it was releasing a prototype Tango tablet, but only for developers. The version made by LG will be intended for consumers, and presumably, cheaper than the $1024 developer version.
If you’re keen to get your hands on one of Google’s modular Ara phones, the bad news is you’re going to be waiting a while: the company has said at its first developer’s conference they won’t go on public sale until January of next year. You will, though, be able to configure your own phone using a Moto Maker style tool that will allow you to not only select your components but add customized colors and designs to them as you do …
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q1JzJadgHY]
Ahead of the first Ara Development Conference on 15 & 16 April, Google has released a teaser video showing a few glimpses into the project to create a phone with swappable modules, allowing customers to configure a phone to order and update individual components at a later date …
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Project Ara, the modular phone project announced by Motorola’s ATAP team last year, will be getting its own developer conference this April. Google announced the event on the Project Ara website (via AndroidPolice) and noted that a live stream with “interactive Q&A capability” will be available online for those that can’t attend. The conference will take place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and Google says there will be a limited number of attendees. The event will focus heavily on a new Ara Module Developers’ Kit that will be released online in early April:
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