There are numerous threads on Reddit that explain very well why this concept is not really feasible [1,2,many]
The (imho) most important ones in short:
* Mechanical modularity increases size and cost, makes it harder to create a beautiful phone, and is not in the manufacturer's commercial interests. Therefore, it would be hard to find companies/customers to build/buy this.
* Many current components are highly integrated - SoCs, sensor ICs, Display/Touchscreen, etc. Making these modular would require development of many new components (and would increase size, cost, power consumption).
* The concept assumes that all components use a common communication backplane. This is not feasible, as a variety of voltages and communication protocols are in use in a typical phone (I2C, SPI, UART, USB, various display protocols, etc.). Many components need very short connections to the CPU/GPU/whatever without crossing other PCB traces. It is not really feasible to make this work with a generic communication backplane. Proper heat dissipation for CPU/GPU is another problem.
In summary, while it is certainly feasible to build a modular phone (look at David Mellis' DIY cellphone [3]), doing so for current hardware would involve major engineering effort (== design and manufacture dozens of new chips) and would result in less stable, more expensive, and less beautiful phones requiring more power.
Nevertheless, such ideas are certainly helpful to catalyze thoughts about future hardware.
While this is obviously very far from feasible, what _is_ possible is a return to servicability for the two parts that most commonly fail: batteries and screens. The rest of the phone is usually fine unless subjected to serious physical battering. The legendarily reliable Nokia 3210 is your landmark here.
Note that in a modern phone, the screen strength usually is achieved by bonding it to the case, so in practice "replace screen" turns into "take mainboard out of case and place in new case".
Modularity doesn't really help at all with the constant drive to replace working phones with newer, better ones. But there should be an effective secondhand market selling them to the Third world - and there is! No shortage of websites offering people money for their old phones.
Long term, we have to wait for the Moore's law slowdown, and a rise in Chinese manufacturing wages and other costs, before a local western repair industry becomes viable again.
(Apart from all the other issues, phonebloks would turn "Android fragmentation" into a far more extreme version; you can't guarantee that your peripheral will even be there next time you turn the phone on).
I completely agree. The trend at apple (for example) is to not allow customer to service their phones or laptops (i.e. gluing instead of screwing components together).
Ideally, I wouldn't mind paying ~$100 for a new screen (or any other assembly), but the problem is that the price of replacing exceeds the cost of the part.
One trend is towards purchasing "accidential" warranties and allowing the customer to trade in for a new device if / when something happens. But the issue is that this coverage is at most 2 - 3 years.
Another issue is that in America, for example, most carriers want to subsidize the phones their customers purchase. By doing this, most people don't see the need for keeping an older phone more than 1.5 - 2 years. If the cost of the phone is taken out of the monthly payments and forced upon the customers, this may allow more people to keep phones for a lot longer.
There should also be a better way to return phones for recycling. Mining the gold and minerals is destructive and it's weird to me that it's easier and cheaper to dig up ore and process it than to grind up old tech and process that.
Which is an enormous racket and close to impossible to comply with economically for small manufacturers in some countries.
As an example, in Germany, if you are a small electronics manufacturer and sign up to the system, you get entered into a lottery weighted by the amount of devices (measured by weight) you ship, and whenever a container of e-waste gets filled, a randomly selected unlucky participant has to take possession of said container, no matter where it happens to be or what it's full of, and find some way to dispose of it. It's absolutely insane. In addition, you have to pay a fee to get to participate, and also you are subject to random inspections by an entity with absolutely no oversight that is legally prevented from having competitors. You have to pay for the inspections yourself too, to the same entity, which also runs said lottery.
There's no option to only accept your own devices for recycling, and also no option to contribute to a shared fund that takes care of it all. There's a small industry that will sell you INSURANCE against winning the shit lottery.
I'm still wrestling with CE approval for a device containing a GSM module. Which looks like it's going to be about E15000 for the radio and electrical testing, plus the complexities of RoHS compliance (random lab testing required, even if all your components are certified lead-free?)
I've concluded that Tindie-style electronics cottage industry is basically illegal in the EU. Fortunately I can still buy stuff from dealextreme and alibaba that doesn't have to comply..
With a GSM module, you want a pre-approved module so you only need to do EMC testing. Doing your own radio testing is ridiculous and expensive. For RoHS compliance you should be able to get away with a declaration as long as not only the components but also the assembly process is lead-free. Incidentally, I have some thoughts on fixing this process, if you'd be willing to talk about it. Contact me on IRC (Kliment on the freenode network) or at kliment at 0xfb.com (yes, that is a zero)
* the site does not have anything on it besides a video and an Amazon widget (go for the quick bucks?)
* it is not a real site, but a campaign on thunderclap.it (a new kind of service and really interesting concept )
* the video promotes an idea that you can have a good looking phone which you can customize however you want - who wouldn't want that?
* they let the impression that it's only the petty, nasty corporations that don't want such a phone to exist, just to be able to upsell us more phones and rip off our hard earned money, totally not addressing the technical issues.
What could happen (it already did) - the video and the campaign went viral, so:
* the authors of the campaign get a few thousands of dollars from the Amazon referral commissions
* people hear and see the power of crowdspeaking platforms in action (thunderclap.it)
as poorly thought out as this looks, what I wouldn't give for a smart phone with a very low resolution e-ink swapped in screen plus the opportunity to replace all the camerawork,sensors, storage , etc with more battery. At least this may get someone thinking about the idea.
also the video and concepts kept making me think of how hot a big metallic "speed block" would be against my hand
E-ink has too many problems, and it's not very good for anything other than mostly static content. If you're thinking "like Pebble" - Pebble doesn't use e-ink. It's using a type of LCD similar to PixelQi.
Mirasol on the other hand, has a ton of potential, and it seems to improve the overall battery life of a device by at least 3x (which means the display itself should be many times more efficient than LCD). Too bad nobody has picked up yet (other than Qualcomm themselves [1]) to use it into a line of products, so we can see improvements done faster to it (such as to color accuracy, gamut, contrast, animation speed, etc).
Despite the disadvantages, I would really like an e-ink phone (and netbook) for the significant increase in battery life it could give. The software could be designed so that it is usable on e-ink. No animations, no reliance on color for indicators, flipping instead of scrolling, etc. As you say, it would only really work for static content, but for me that is fine.
Almost any phone not a smartphone could fit your description. There are so many phones that can last for almost a week, but all you can do is talk and text with some light apps.
eink could be useful, perhaps more for a larger tablet "blocks" device. You could put in the eink screen when you wish to use it as an ereader, for optimal reading experience, and then replace it with a different screen for watching movies, etc.
A lot of people did and still do. And that was actually quite 'hard' because you had to touch micro electronics. If you make PCs (phones, laptops) out of Lego, people will do it much faster and more often. Going to a gig? Pull out the bluetooth, plug in the midi block. Going on the road in 2 countries? Pull an USB block, plug in a second 4G. Etc.
Edit; not saying this is a good idea for a phone, but to some extend it would be for a laptop (not ultrabook). Some rugged ones are quite like that.
Or buy the integrated phone that includes all of those features and doesn't make you swap them out and risk losing or damaging the blocks.
Modularity often ends up being a _cost_ to the unsophisticated majority of end users. People don't like it in their software (preferring a "complete solution"), nor in their hardware (e.g. cheap integrated hifi versus expensive minority separates).
Desktops are still made from interchangeable components.
I upgraded RAM, video card, sound card, added more hard drives, retired old ones. Later on I replaced CPU+motherboard (unfortunately you can rarely just upgrade the CPU).
If you're not lazy, this can save you quite a lot of money.
Phones are nothing like PCs, and will not be for a long time. It would take some crazy engineering to make them lego-like, or even plain upgradeable.
Instead of trying to make improvements to Apple's (or whoever's) stuff, let's stimulate consumer demand for great looking _enclosures_ for (small form factor) hardware. There should be a market for enclosures that look as good as Apple's (or whoever's). Note I said "as good as" not "just like".
Give consumers the option to mix and match enclosures with the cheap electronics that go inside and see what happens.
The growing market for RaspberryPi enclosures stands as proof that it is possible to have many different enclosures, made by third parties, for the same PCB. And that consumers will buy them.
I've long wondered why there should not be a wide variety of enclosures to choose from for various popular small form factor "development" boards. Would such enclosures sell? Why not? The growing number of third party Pi cases being sold is testing that assumption.
I'd even go so far as to guess that if you give consumers great looking enclosures to choose from, you will actually sell more development boards.
1. Blocks are having different sizes. Sure you may have some fillers, but they don't look nice. A light drop could shatter the whole thing (phone must be able to take hits and drops for many reasons)
2. The pluggable architecture calls for the backbone to be some sort of shared bus, example will be I2C, which may not be efficient for high-bandwidth transfer (e.g. camera to memory). A dedicated bus for some modules will just break the 'plugability'. Mitigation could be to zone the backbone so that each zone's traffic is limited, well, that is not simple...
What bus can be used which will be fast enough for all of the components to work together? Sticking a cpu, camera, memory, and screen on the same bus will cause an amazing bottleneck.
How will the components be made to fit in the same thickness? Can you really fit a higher resolution camera in a larger (but not thicker) package?
In that regard, what's to stop someone from making an uber battery which only takes up a few slots but then covers the previous layer on the back, thereby increasing the real estate?
How much force can those pins hold?
Will the bins be biased in some way such that the positive will be every N pins and negative every M pins, and data lines every L pins or something? If so, will the holes be keyed to ensure proper placement?
There are a lot of questions to be answered before this thing can come to fruition, and I think the bus is going to be the biggest limitation. There's a reason this phone doesn't exist yet, as I'm sure hardware manufacturers would love to continue selling people hardware over and over, but there's a genuine problem with bandwidth in this setup where anything can go anywhere.
A better solution would be universal plugs/ports with specific uses for each port. Battery port, CPU port, memory port, and then accessory ports, just like a modern desktop. This would allow the components with the largest bottlenecks to have their own dedicated bus.
This is a pretty naive idea. There are a lot of reasons to go in the opposite direction
For example, water-resistant phones are going to be hard to take apart, and that's a feature that will result in many fewer dead phones.
Packaging for mobile handsets is continuing to evolve. Any modular system would be obsolete long before it breaks even on repairability, upgradeability, etc.
I think this idea is brilliant. I may be in the minority but I think this would be a great thing for young kids to teach them how components can be swapped out very easily. I would get one of these for my 10 year just to watch him figure out what he'd like to add or upgrade.
In order to reduce electronics waste, we should recycle what's already there. Not invent a new phone that's easier to recycle. Also, people will want to upgrade or change their phone configuration even when it's not broken. I don't understand why the video is pitching the product as if its sustainable and fighting waste. It's not.
I completely understand the appeal of the concept, but it seems like it would be significantly more expensive for the same features of another phone. I'd be concentrating on the features that most frequently drive upgrades other than the screen: memory and camera.
But then you also need to include those features that most frequently crap out: screen, battery (easy enough), jacks (maybe a block of jacks -- power, microusb, headphones?).
Otherwise you'll be upgrading memory and camera on a broken phone.
It's a wonderful concept, but extraordinarily hard to pull off. I'm glad he's trying to find partners before any thought of crowdsourcing.
Why would you -have- to? I've never broken any of those things personally, other than the typical battery charge degradation. If the camera+battery+memory are modules, it may be cheaper just to replace/tradein the main body over doing a repair.
Handwavy on the costs, but modular is definitely more expensive - being able to trick out your phone with bigger memory and large-aparture camera may be worth it to a certain set of customers.
Agree it's a wonderful but hard to implement concept.
My biggest gripe with this is, what problem does this actually solve?
Phones exist as they are as a sealed unit, so if something fails or you want something new, you buy it from the manufacturer or network.
Networks or manufacturers wouldn't want this kind of thing because it would affect their profits, so what's in it for them? What solution is it offering them?
That's before we even get into the engineering flaws...
> "Phones exist as they are as a sealed unit, so if something fails or you want something new, you buy it from the manufacturer or network."
This is the problem that it solves. It's obviously a great feature from the manufacturer's point of view.
> "Networks or manufacturers wouldn't want this kind of thing because it would affect their profits, so what's in it for them? What solution is it offering them?"
This attitude makes them prime candidates to be disrupted. If someone can provide a better experience for the customer that solves the same problem that you solve, then you're at risk of being eliminated.
> "That's before we even get into the engineering flaws..."
This is my biggest concern with this project. Still, good on them for trying. A lot of disruptive technology comes from technologies written off as too-difficult or too-complex to make work.
I agree that this would certainly create problems for the network and the manufacturers. If it better solves a customer problem, and you are able to overcome the problems it creates for the people creating the device, they will suddenly have a significant competitive advantage over the manufacturers that didn't consider better ways to solve the customer's problem.
As a network and/or a manufacturer (or any industry leader), I would be watching potentially disruptive technologies very closely to make sure something didn't blindside me and knock me off my post.
Finally, as I said before, I think this will generally be technically nonviable for many of the technical concerns mentioned by other commentators. There are good reasons that the components in most devices are very tightly coupled.
Well standards and replaceable parts brought the PC to world domination.
And the networks should be removed from the device business at all.
So a smartphone that could be assembled and upgraded with full control and root access is idea that I stand behind. And if it forces the carries to compete on services and not lock people with contracts all the better.
Standards cheap replaceable parts brought the PC to dominate their very expensive IBM counterpart.
See the problem, is that this idea, with today's technology would be more expensive to build than the device it is competing against. (if it was possible at all)
And if you need to go against the network too, it means competing against $200 iPhone5s and the like.
I have said the exact same quote for the iPhone. And have heard it about the Raspberry Pi. Probably someone somewhere in the early 80s have said it about the IBM-PC. Geek toys have the power to change the world when the brain behind them leverages them to new and amazing things.
one alternative would be to have a phone with a cpu that can be desoldered and replaced easily and in a more voluminous case (maybe a nice cnc milled alumin(i)um case)
"Desoldered and replaced easily"? Clearly, you've never actually desoldered anything. :) It's a tricky process which requires a good deal of special-purpose equipment and training, and even with that, there's a nontrivial chance that you'll damage the part, the board, or both in the process. It's not something you'd ever want to do on end-user equipment.
Wasn't the Moto X supposed to be super configurable like this? It got me excited from the rumors and the hype. At the end it turned out to be just some colors that can be picked.
> And finally— the mysterious device(s) will be completely customizable by allowing the device’s color, RAM and internal storage to be completely configurable.
The (imho) most important ones in short:
* Mechanical modularity increases size and cost, makes it harder to create a beautiful phone, and is not in the manufacturer's commercial interests. Therefore, it would be hard to find companies/customers to build/buy this.
* Many current components are highly integrated - SoCs, sensor ICs, Display/Touchscreen, etc. Making these modular would require development of many new components (and would increase size, cost, power consumption).
* The concept assumes that all components use a common communication backplane. This is not feasible, as a variety of voltages and communication protocols are in use in a typical phone (I2C, SPI, UART, USB, various display protocols, etc.). Many components need very short connections to the CPU/GPU/whatever without crossing other PCB traces. It is not really feasible to make this work with a generic communication backplane. Proper heat dissipation for CPU/GPU is another problem.
In summary, while it is certainly feasible to build a modular phone (look at David Mellis' DIY cellphone [3]), doing so for current hardware would involve major engineering effort (== design and manufacture dozens of new chips) and would result in less stable, more expensive, and less beautiful phones requiring more power.
Nevertheless, such ideas are certainly helpful to catalyze thoughts about future hardware.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/1m6y1q/that_phonebl...
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m4pmy/el...
[many] http://www.reddit.com/r/all/search?q=phonebloks&restrict_sr=...
[3] http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=2182