It’s been awhile since we heard anything regarding Project Ara, and it wasn’t good news, as the modular smartphone which allows users to swap its internal parts and switch between various features was officially delayed until 2016 last summer. And while there still isn’t any clear indication of whether the commercial release of this innovative smartphone platform will indeed be coming this calendar year, there has been some development in the murky Internet waters where a screenshot of a Project Ara device has surfaced. Even more interesting than that is the fact that the device in question seems to be some kind of a tablet.
However, while the benchmark results state that the tested device has a 1920 x 1080 13.8-inch screen, that may not necessarily be true as there has been absolutely no word from Google, Motorola, or even Phoneblocks regarding a potential Project Ara tablet, so it seems more likely that the testing software is simply mistakenly showing the resolution and screen size of a device used to benchmark it, and not that of the modular portable itself.
In any case, the first benchmarked Project Ara device is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC featuring four high-performance Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 1.9 GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores designed for more conservative power consumption at frequencies up to 1.6 GHz. In addition to that, it comes with an Adreno 430 GPU, 2.7 GB of RAM, a 4.8-megapixel front-facing camera, and a 0.3-megapixel rear-facing one. The mysterious unit is also equipped with everything else one would expect from a modern smartphone (or a tablet) as its body includes an accelerometer, barometer, compass, gyroscope, light sensor, pedometer, and a proximity sensor. It also supports Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and Wi-Fi, in addition to having an SIM-card slot. Needless to say, many people in the industry have been excited about the prospect of a modular smartphone and all of the future tech implications that it entails ever since Project Ara was first announced in October of 2013. So, hopefully, this news means that the original smartphone initiative is still going strong regardless of whether the Project Ara team started experimenting with tablets at a time when it seems that after years of development, the commercial launch of the smartphone platform is still far away.
