Today, starts the second Project Ara developer conference. The keynote took place this morning, and we learned some cool new things about Project Ara. For one, their pilot market is going to be Puerto Rico. Which is rather interesting, to say the least. They didn’t state when Project Ara would be available in Puerto Rico, other than “This year”. Google is going to be partnering with Ingram Micro, OpenMobile, and Claro. They are also looking to distribute devices through mobile food-truck style stores in Puerto Rico. Which should make it very easy to get your hands on some modules for your new smartphone.
So why did Google choose Puerto Rico? I’m sure we aren’t the only ones wondering about that. Here’s what Google said regarding their choice of Puerto Rico:
“Puerto Ricans are mobile first…The carrier landscape is diverse and competitive with U.S., Latin American, and local carriers. As a U.S. territory, Puerto Rico is under FCC jurisdiction so we would continue our work with the FCC on a regulatory approach for Ara. Puerto Rico is a gateway from the U.S. to the world…It is well-connected as a communications, logistics and trade hub. It has designated free trade zones which we can use for importing modules from developers worldwide. University of Puerto system (all 11 campuses) have joined the ATAP Multi-University Research Agreement (MURA) which provides an agile and flexible mechanism for engaging individual faculty and labs in research to support Ara and other ATAP projects.”
The Project Ara developers conference is going on this week, so we’ll likely learn even more about it this week, including how easy or hard it is to swap out modules and when it might be coming to the rest of the US. Google has also made the latest MDK available for download today.
How many of you are excited for Project Ara? Let us know in the comments below.