Be Excellent To Each Other

http://phonebloks.com/

What a bloody great idea. Sure it looks like shit, and I can see a multitude of compatibility issues in the future, but those are all fixable problems.

It'll never happen though.

That's an amazing idea, but I see massive software issues. Phones are one area that hasn't had to deal with driver trouble, but what happens when you introduce interchangeable hardware?

Looks interesting...

The blocks would have to have completely standard interfaces, however the hardware could be different in the blocks. The battery interface wouldn't need to change between battery sizes, for example. Or the physical speaker could be better in one block than another.
All you'd have to worry about is if the block is there or not, or if you wanted to be more clever, what part of the interface each block supports. i.e. the camera lense block may or may not have optical zoom capability.

Tricky, but not impossible.

But third parties build bloks. How do they build software support into the OS for hardware features their bloks provide?

Has this been dreamt up by someone who has any kind of understanding about how electronic devices are designed and manufactured? I'm guessing not. Completely impractical I reckon. Unless you don't mind a phone the size of a laptop.

I'd expect the list of possible blocks to be limited and relatively fixed. The quality and capability within the defined feature set of those blocks can differ though.

is your main problem, I reckon. Making everything a certain size will end up giving you a huge phone.

It's not technically impossible, but..

What, the insides are infinitely customisable and the outside is constrained to being a functional grey plastic brick? As a product designer (read: snob) I can tell you that isn't going to sell. Even if it's much cheaper than a conventional smartphone. Which it won't be.

It can be any colour you like, presumably. The main board could also come in different sizes and shapes, although then you'd have issues with the screen (the rear bits could just sit inside a bevel, presumably).

Also, on the customization front, the pleasant and reasonable man is suggesting that if you want longer battery life then just fit a bigger battery. but I counter that with Tetris, by which i mean to leave space for the bigger battery you would have to change all the surrounding blocks for smaller ones.

I want a camera bit, but because of my battery block I need a T shape or an L shape camera rather than a square.

It'll never work.

Humpback batteries! If it worked for Nokia...

Hooray! your new phone has arrived!

Unless the bigger battery is thicker instead of larger.

You see, the thing about a multinational company like, say Apple, you know those guys who repeatedly win awards for their designs, or Samsung, those guys who continually cram all sorts of stuff into smaller and smaller spaces. Well, those guys are kind of good at it, and they get paid a lot of money to be good at it. Me, not so good at it, particularly when I have very limited parts to choose from, and those components are guaranteed to be bigger than the components that the experts have to work with. I like the concept, but it just seems silly, you are going to end up with an Homer's car of a phone.

Shut the fuck up. I'm awesome at phones and awesome at lego. I can't see how this wouldn't be the best thing ever.

I want a jaggy phone with 7 cameras.

I want a massive screen phone, with a tiny battery block on the back, and the rest cameras. All of which are set to fire microseconds apart.

So what do the Phoneblocks people bring to the table? Are they making something, or are they just putting their feetup now that they've found out Motorola have something similar and get the moral superiority of "told you so"?

I imagine they're going 'FUCK! Now our cool hobbyist idea is dead in the water because someone who actually has the clout to bring third party hardware manufacturers on board is doing the exact same thing'. Moral superiority doesn't buy you dinner.

The article says:



Malc

Reading is for girls.

Yeah, the cool kids go to Didcot

I bet you read for fun.

Where "working with" means Phonebloks turned up for one presentation.

Still pointless