Many of you are probably pretty excited for Project Ara. It’s basically a build it yourself type of smartphone, where you can replace elements like the processor, RAM, camera, battery, and just about everything else. It’s a really neat project, that was started with Motorola, although Google kept that part of Motorola when they sold them to Lenovo. They are the ATAP team at Google. At Google I/O last week, Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects showed their first prototype of a booting Project Ara device. Which means it’s come a long way since the first video we saw of the device which was about a year ago now. Google was looking for 100 beta testers to test out Project Ara before they make it available to everyone in 2015. And they’ve now found their 100 people.
“Since October 2013, over 90,000 have signed up to make Project Ara a reality. Your passion and creativity were – and are – instrumental in turning an ideainto a product. As promised, the 100 most active Ara scouts will be among the first to receive a phone – gratis. We couldn’t have done it without you!”
If you want to know who the winners are, they are listed on the announcement page which is in the source links down below. So far there’s no word as to when these beta testers will get their hands on their own Project Ara device, but we should be seeing them shipping out to these 100 people pretty soon, since consumer launch is slated for the beginning of 2015.
This is a very exciting project for Google, as it means we won’t need to buy a new phone every year or two. Instead we can just upgrade the components. Allow us to upgrade our display, battery, camera, and just about everything. It’s really an amazing thing.