Google Announces Android Phone Ara
PanARMENIAN.Net – Google announced on May 20 that it’s moving the ambitious Project Ara modular smartphone team into its own proper unit within Google, under new hardware chief (and former Motorola president) Rick Osterloh. And a consumer Ara phone is coming in 2017 as well, which marks the first time Google has ever built its own phone hardware.
Ara Knaian of Armenian origin is a chief mechanic engineer and co-founder of Project Ara, after whom it is named.
Project Ara aims to reinvent the smartphone by breaking it down into modules that can be assembled and customized in a limitless number of configurations, Time explained in a 2014 article.
Google showed off a working prototype version of Ara on last week, which lets users live-swap hardware modules like cameras and speakers onto a base frame which contains the core phone components – users can even say, “Okay, Google, eject the camera” to release modules, which is pretty cool. It has six modular slots — each one is generic, so you can put any module in any slot, and they’re all linked up through new open standard called Unipro that can push 11.9 gigabits of data in both directions.
The developer version of Ara will ship this fall, while the consumer version will hit sometime in 2017. And developers can sign up to build Ara modules now.
