Phonebloks concept, a good idea?
 

looks like it could be a great idea, I love anything you can customize!


project here:

https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/2931-phonebloks

One of the top comments from the reddit thread was,
"this is why engineers hate marketers"

We can't even upgrade any part of our phone as it is, imagine how hard it will be to make this work.

It's a cool concept, but yeah, I can't see it being as simple as they're saying. I can see it getting a big following, though.
Posted via RS Mobile

IMO, this is a concept imagined by a person who has little to no EE background.

First of all, what standard would the "pin" uses? You can only simplify so much. A component needs electric current, signal path, heat-dissipation... and so much more.

The most user-serviceable product in IT industry: PC, has the support of everything the vid mentioned, and it's still nowhere near as simple as the concept suggests.

It's a very cool idea. But its technological challenge is beyond financial feasibility.

that's all fine and dandy but can it run Crysis?

awesome concept, gonna be ridiculously hard to actually implement though

sounds like a good idea.. but the execution part would be the toughest... I doubt any phone makers would go for this.. the R&D would cost so much....

no for profit will company will go for this. last i checked corps want to move products as fast as possible. the whole point of the camera dying is to make the user get a new phone with a better camera and slightly modified features (read - iphone 5S). Why would anyone want to sell a $150 camera upgrade when they can sell the same camera upgrade with slight additions for $700 ?!?!?

good in theory - dumb in practice.

If this was remotely feasible/profitable. Intel would've pulled it off ages ago. But nope we still have to buy a new motherboard pretty much everytime they release new CPUs.
Posted via RS Mobile

Okay.

As a practicing EE with some background in smartphone design, I can honestly say that what's pictured there is doable, but in a much more limited sense than he's proposing. And it wouldn't look anything like that.

Briefly:
1) It would be heavy and massive (much more so than in the video).
2) It would run really hot and have terrible battery life.
3) You wouldn't be able to upgrade it anymore within a year or two anyway. And the upgrades would be expensive.
4) The device itself would be expensive. Really, really incredibly expensive.

It would be the ultimate piece of shit. But if people are willing to pay for it, it will happen.

Kony 2012!!!!!!!!

oh

wait...

BLOCK PHONE 2013!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have a bad habit of having phones dropped or thrown at walls.

Just imagine the thing hitting a hard surface and all the little legos falling all over the place.

So I would have to get an even bigger case to fit all of this junk in and keep it hermetically sealed.

It would be a huge brick phone.

didn't they try this before? a different company had swappable cpu "cartridges" for a customizeable phone? not to the same level this is trying to achieve, but similar idea.

i can see maybe 3 components max that can be swappable, being a cpu, battery and camera, and just maybe, ram.

still needs a stupidly large enclosure and likely only one company can manufacture it.

i see it being far more convenient to simply upgrade the whole phone/buy new. no matter how much you upgrade, the phone will still look the same year after year. i cant see anyone, besides Apple folks, digging that.

reminds me of those hobbyist electronics breadboards. definintely a niche market if any market at all

^ Still won't go anywhere. I'll go out on a limb and predict this will NEVER happen in the next 10 years. Not only would it be extremely difficult from the hardware side, but there's no mobile OS with support for this type of concept (building your own device and configuring all the pieces to work together).

10 years is a long time dude! 10 years ago we didn't even have iphones, android, none of that. In fact, just in the past 5 years, the cell phone industry have completely revolutionized. I think with Google at the helm of Motorola, this can be a reality someday.

props for Moto for being innovative (Moto X and now this)

I see a very small market for modular design in the mobile space though...most are upgrading every 2 years or so anyways because of contract subsidy. It took decades for PC to develop so many standards to make modular design possible.


perhaps Ubuntu is a possibility?