Was just about to hit the hay for the evening when this came through the wire. Honestly, I’m not even entirely sure I’m not still dreaming in my onesie but here goes. Revealed in a press release just moments ago is Motorola’s upcoming open hardware platform dubbed Project Ara. Yes, you heard right. According to Motorola, they want to do to hardware, what Android has done to software by creating an open based modular smartphone platform.
The goal is to have 3rd party developers create pieces of a phone that can be decided upon by the user, not unlike what we saw in the Phonebloks concept we showed you a few weeks ago. While everyone could agree that allowing users to choose individual components of a smartphone could be fun, it sounded so far fetched many — myself included — dismissed it as a dream that simply wasn’t possibly. Oh, how wrong we were.
According to Motorola, each device will come with an “endo” (think endoskeleton) that holds all the different components together. And skies the limit when it comes to the modules that can be attached to an endo — hardware keyboards, faster processor, bigger battery, or something different altogether (taser gun maybe?).
The craziest part is that Motorola says they’ve been working on Project Ara for over a year now and it wasn’t until recently they teamed up with the creator of Phonebloks, who has already begun laying the groundwork for a community based on open, customizable, modular-based hardware.
Motorola says the MDK (Module Developer’s Kit) will be released sometime in the next few months, where developers will be invited to start creating modules for Project Ara. More info to come. Okay, seriously. Is this a dream?
[Motorola]
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