Motorola's Project Ara modular concept harkens back to Palm's glory days

There's nothing new about Motorola's Project Ara, at least so far: it's a design concept that is strikingly reminiscent of the Handspring Visor, back when Palm-powered personal digital assistants (PDAs) rocked the mobile world over a decade ago.

 

On October 28, Motorola announced that it is taking smartphone customization one step further by allowing a user to not only choose the phone's back cover or ringtones, but also components like camera and storage.

 

Dubbed Project Ara, Motorola's new endeavor aims to encourage innovation while lowering the time to develop hardware.

 

"(P)roject Ara is developing a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines," said Paul Eremenko of the Project Ara Team.

 

He said their goal is to drive "a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones."

 

It aims to give users the power "to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it," he added.

 

Under Project Ara, a phone will have an endoskeleton or structural frame and modules such as processors, displays, keyboards, or even an extra battery, "or something not yet thought of!"

 

Make-a-thons

 

Eremenko said the MAKEwithMOTO team took a truck wrapped velcro and filled with rooted, hackable Motorola smartphones and 3D printing equipment for "make-a-thons" in the last six months.

 

After that trip, he said the team asked themselves, "how do we bring the benefits of an open hardware ecosystem to 6 billion people?"

 

Ara modules and Phonebloks

 

Eremenko said the team met recently with Phonebloks creator Dave Hakkens. Phonebloks is a similar endeavor that takes smartphone design cues from Lego bricks.

 

He said it turned out Project Ara and Phonebloks share a common vision, "to develop a phone platform that is modular, open, customizable, and made for the entire world."

 

"We’ve done deep technical work. Dave created a community. The power of open requires both.  So we will be working on Project Ara in the open, engaging with the Phonebloks community throughout our development process, as well as asking questions to our Project Ara research scouts," he said.

 

He said they will soon send invitations to developers to start creating modules for the Ara platform, adding there could be prizes.

 

Eremenko also hinted at an alpha release of the Module Developer’s Kit (MDK) sometime this winter.

 

Remembering the Handspring Visor 

 

However, Project Ara's core philosophy of customizability through modular construction is something that's been done before—and, it should be noted, with huge success.

 

In 1998, the inventors of the original Palm PDA decided to create a new company after reportedly being unhappy with how 3Com was handling the business.

 

Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan founded Handspring, which licensed the Palm OS for a range of PDA devices with a unique twist: an expansion slot that accepted various kinds of cartridges, ranging from additional memory to a mobile phone.

 

 

The revolutionary concept allowed people to customize their devices to suit their individual tastes and needs, even without any technical knowledge of the PDAs' internal workings. The cartridges were all "hot swappable", making upgrades as easy as unplugging a module and inserting a new one.

 

Sadly, however, the eventual rise of the mobile phone in the early to mid-2000's was the death knell for PDAs in general—and Palm and Handspring in particular.

 

Moreover, the increased versatility of smartphones made PDAs obsolete.

 

Handspring was bought up by its rival, Palm, in 2003 and the latter was bought by HP in 2010.

 

And now, it seems that Motorola is taking things full circle: after creating a successful run of mobile phones and smart phones, it seems that the company wants to explore the modular customizability pioneered by its now-defunct rivals over a decade ago.

 

With backing from Google

 

Android enthusiast site AndroidPolice.com said Motorola with Google's backing can potentially trigger an "honest-to-goodness revolution in the smartphone industry."

 

"Want a better camera, but don't need much storage? You can spend big on the image sensor and cheap-out on the NAND. Speaker in your phone busted? Just disconnect it and add a new module. Rather than buy a whole new phone, you could simply upgrade the parts you want," it said. — TJ Dimacali, GMA News