A very surprising update these past days is the official confirmation of Google’s Project Ara. The announcement was made by Google’s own ATAP division via a video that was posted on their Google+ page and Youtube. The video goes to show the mind-blowing potential of Project Ara’s modular design. What is Project Ara all about though?
The modular nature of Project Ara refers to the fact that the device is comprised out of different modules that encase the different hardware functions of the smartphone, and are fitted to a basic model board. For example, there will be one module for the CPU, one for the storage, one for the memory, speakers, battery, camera and so on. Wooow wait… Does that mean you can play around with it as much as you like?? Hell YEAH! Google described Project Ara’s modular design as being inclusive of both components and user into one “quasi-mechanism”. So basically you can go all out with customization options for this innovative baby. And not only will you choose whatever piece of equipment you want for your phone, you get to choose the manufacturer as well. Maybe you would like a Sony camera, with a DAC audio decoder, a Snapdragon processor and Marshall Audio Speakers, and the list can go on forever.
If that is not news to you or maybe just not that impressive, wait until you get a load of this… Google stated at I/O 2014 that they got both Marvell and Nvidia on board to design some unique CPUs for Project Ara. That is some eye-popping news indeed and here is the extract of the statement posted on Google+ for a more clear view: “For the AP modules, we have been working with our friends at Marvell and NVIDIA to create two separate reference designs and form factor module prototypes around their PXA1928 and Tegra K1 processors, respectively, using a Toshiba UniPro bridge ASIC to connect to the on-device network.”
You might be surprised to learn that Project Ara is going to be deployed sooner than you think, this year. Official statements suggest that Project Ara will be piloted in Puerto Rico to see how things will be going. At the rate at which Project Ara is evolving developments are bound to happen as we speak. Holding your own Ara in the palm of your hand is not that far away, and boy oh boy am I excited to see the end result.