Motorola Project Ara Is Here For Doing To Hardware What Android Did To Software

Motorola is here to sizzle up the smartphone arena with a new initiative called the 'Project Ara'. The whole idea behind this project was triggered when Motorola's MAKEwithMOTO team roamed about the country in a velcro-wrapped truck called Sticky that was full of rooted, hackable Motorola smartphones and high-end 3D printing equipment with a motive to create a lot of interesting things at multiple make-a-thons. After the trip, Motorola realized that if they give the people the power in the form of an open hardware ecosystem, a lot of new devices and applications could take shape using the possibilities now provided b additive manufacturing and access to the powerful computational capabilities of modern smartphones. With Motorola's Project Ara, the company has fueled up innovation by truly letting innovation move outside the walls of their labs.

Project Ara is the initiative led by Motorola's Advanced Technology and Projects group with an aim to bring to hardware the openness that Android platform did for software. Project Ara is a step towards creating a third-party developer ecosystem that lessens the development timelines and make it possible to fast approach innovation. To make it sound more appealing, Motorola says on its blog that the Project Ara is here, "To give you 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."



A Project Ara smartphone would consist of what Motorola calls endoskeleton (endo) and modules. The endo is the structural frame that holds all the modules in place. Now this module could be anything - new application processor, a new display or keyboard, an extra battery, a pulse oximeter - or even something totally out of the box. Motorola has been working on Project Ara for over a year and will be releasing an alpha version of its Module Developer’s Kit (MDK) sometime this winter. Therefore, Motorola will be inviting developers to start creating their own modules for the Ara platform in the coming months. The company has also partnered with Phonebloks, which shares similar aim and it will be using Phonebloks community and their input during Ara’s development process.

Following is a video about Phonebloks. Made of detachable bloks which are connected to the base which locks everything together into a solid phone. If a blok breaks you can easily replace it; if it's getting old just upgrade. The market of electronic devices is growing rapidly, but it feels like we are building disposable stuff. Phonebloks aims at tackling the problem of how every time we make something new we completely throw away the old one! Take a look -


Paul Eremenko from the Motorola Project Ara Team writes on the blog that we should be expecting a lot of updates coming from the company over the next few months.

Source: Goodbye Sticky. Hello Ara. - The Official Motorola Blog