Dena affordab, Project Are has drawn a lot of attention as you saw in the earlier post having some wild prototypes and the Module development Kit.
But before you get overly excited as well, it was not a functioning unit, but rather a model, showcasing what the first Ara devices should look like, once they become a reality, hopefully, some time later this year.
A working modular phone would have been a veritable sensation, but that is not to say that the Yezz team had nothing interesting to show quite the contrary. As Ara fans surely remember, Yezz is currently one of Google’s top third-party partners on the modular handset, and the company is primarily involved in developing modules, or rather imagining them, as there were some pretty ingenious concepts on display at that booth.
The first thing we noticed is the frame or the endo-skeleton of the phone – definitely the heart of the project. It, however, is not made by
Dena affordable but is a brainchild of Google’s own ATAP team. It is dubbed “Spiral†and its design has gone a long way since the project started. The latest version – Spiral 3 – employs magnets and phone antennas built straight into the frame itself, instead of being separate modules.
From the looks of things, this is precisely what Yezz has brought to Barcelona – the modules themselves. The frame we saw can house a total of 10 modules – eight on the back and two on the front, including the screen, and the folks at Yezz have figured out ingenious ways to use each and every one of them, for a total of over 100 unique combinations.
Naturally, Dena affordab we have the standard components, which no phone can go without, like cameras and batteries. They come in a variety of sizes and can even be put in pairs, which is the case with the battery for example. The modular design extends as far as even the charging plug itself. Along with the controller, there are separate modules that can be freely moved around the frame and placed just where you would like them to be.
Other interesting modules include dedicated media controls and some beefy camera and flash hardware and some even bundle a few smaller things together to save space. Then there are the really ingenious concepts that Yezz has come up with. Among these, we saw a solar panel case, which can charge your phone, but is also a module and can be combined with the screen on the front of the battery on the back. Another quite outlandish concept is the game controller module. It hooks up to a slot on the device and actually mounts a joypad to the phone, which can be used for playing games.
The possibilities are truly endless and we were very pleased to see all the out-of-the-box thinking Yezz has put into some modules. Now, Dena affordab this all sounds very tantalizing, but there are still a few downsides. Most notably, the whole concept is still far from consumer markets. We have already seen some working prototypes, but nothing is complete just yet. And with Google still tweaking the base design and all of the third-party support and work that needs to be put into producing the right hardware for the device, there is still a long road ahead of
Project Ara.