Ask HN: What do you think of modular smart phones?
8 comments
And the PCB is compact because there are tons of high-speed and/or noise-sensitive signals that need to be carefully routed. If you make components modular you now need to run them over (typically fewer conductor) buses. The buses will be slower than direct hardware connections and now when you want to upgrade your 1080p camera to 4k you're still limited by the bus speed of the base phone.
I definitely see it beneficial for upgrade reasons though. I know a lot of people upgrade their phone now because their camera isn't as good as other options out there. Their phone will be working perfectly, but they'll swap out phones for that sole reason. In a case like that, one could simply upgrade their camera component. Same goes with the other components as well, very similar to custom built deskop towers. You have the freedom of taking your time with upgrading components on an as-need basis and on top of that you're able to decide how much of an upgrade you want. Top of the line? Just slightly better than what you have now?
There's also a lot of possibilities with unusual add-on for scientific measurements, add-ons for employees in service industries, add-ons for hacking(think of repurposing your phone as a microcontroller similar to RPi), etc. There's a very wide and diverse market waiting to explode from the possibilities.
There's also a lot of possibilities with unusual add-on for scientific measurements, add-ons for employees in service industries, add-ons for hacking(think of repurposing your phone as a microcontroller similar to RPi), etc. There's a very wide and diverse market waiting to explode from the possibilities.
would there be a corollary to 1, in that the Software would then have to support every possible configuration, and then purely due to resources, wouldn't be optimized for any?
They only make sense to me if all the functionality was based out of a single (or two) type of unit. Camera/Ram/CPU/gps/etc was all just a matter of software. Need more memory? Buy more phone-goo, designate it as RAM, and bam. Basically computronium.
So, in conclusion, completely unrealistic in the near term, or our lifetime.
So, in conclusion, completely unrealistic in the near term, or our lifetime.
If my smartphone were modular in the same way as a desktop PC, I would worry that minor bumps would cause disconnections or shorts. In theory I'd love to upgrade parts at low cost, e.g. upgrading to an AMOLED screen, but ease of disassembly doesn't seem compatible with the durability/weight/size requirement of a device I carry around all the time.
In practice, it's easy to buy a new phone every 1-2 years, and give the old one to a relative.
In practice, it's easy to buy a new phone every 1-2 years, and give the old one to a relative.
They'll go as far as modular laptops.
Big Flop. Modular smartphones provide iterative benefit not revolutionary. Until you have revolutionary breakthrough in product (more software than hardware since hardware is easy to be cloned), these will remain as toys.
Ultimately depends on marketing, consumer reception, how well developed the product is and how overall user experience is. I think that's really what would either make or break it.
Dead end. I suspect a widely varied yet cross-compatible & long lived set of modules & interfaces would leave us with a gigantic / expensive / ugly device.
All the arguments here are valid. However, Hello Kitty will make it succeed.
1) hardware engineering: there is no dead space in a phone, every single square inch is used by something. The PCB is as compact as possible. If you design a modular phone (like project Ara), you easily double the space required. Instant losing proposition: less efficient, more bulky.
2) market: even if you offered a wonderful selection of decent modules, market reality means that 90% of your customers would use no more than 2 or 3 different configurations, at most. If that's the case, forget about modularity, just build those 3 configs and optimize them to death.