Earlier this afternoon, Motorola Mobility’s CEO, Dennis Woodside sat down with YouTube legend (okay maybe not quite a legend yet) Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, and talked about all kinds of things. In particular they talked about Project Ara and Phonebloks. Phonebloks was a pretty interesting idea, but many of us thought it would never work out. It basically is an idea to allow users to replace components of their smartphones very easily and cheaper. Say for instance you want a better camera, just buy the module and put in your phone. Just that easy.
Woodside said in the interview, that Phonebloks does have a prototype that is “pretty close”, but the problem is the interface to allow the various components to directly speak to the motherboard. At this point, there’s no standards to allow the speaker, camera, etc., to talk directly to the motherboard. But this is an issue that Motorola is working on to fix. Motorola is looking to create an open standard rather than building a proprietary solution. That’s very Google-like, if you ask me.
He did hint that when the product is ready, which is still a ways down the road, that the plan is to offer it through MotoMaker. While in the meantime, MotoMaker will be expanding with new materials offered. It sounds as if it won’t be stopping with wood backs, but no specifics were given today. While Project Ara is in development, users can even sign up with the project’s DScout page to get information, even do some missions for Motorola.
The future of MotoMaker actually sounds really interesting. I’m interested to see if Motorola will add more devices to MotoMaker as well as what other materials we might see pop up in there. What other materials would you like to see in MotoMaker for a new Motorola phone? Let us know in the comments below.