Motorola is big on customisation. It created the Moto X, the Android smartphone that you can truly customise with a wide range of colour options and features, and the company wants to take customisation to a whole new level with an ambitious new collaboration that could reinvent the smartphone industry — Motorola calls its vision of the future of smartphones “Project Ara”.
Project Ara takes a modular approach to smartphone design and manufacturing. It’s like Lego with smartphones and it’s all about creating an open system that allows for the creation of immensely customisable and upgradable devices. To make this happen Motorola will be collaborating with, Phonebloks, the people behind this whole idea of modular phones.
Through the project, Motorola wants to put control in the hands of end users. With Ara, the user decides how much your phone costs, what it’s capable of, how it looks and how long it will be in use all using an open modular platform where users can pick and choose parts that they want on their device.
The Project Ara team plans to get developers on-board to start making modules with a Module Developer’s Kit (MDK) expected to be released by the end of this year. It’s going to be interesting how far Project Ara will influence the future of smart devices. In the meantime, lets hope Motorola reestablished an official presence right here in Malaysia.
