About a month ago I wrote a story,"Phonebloks: Absolutely the Coolest Geek Idea of 2013". Today Fierce Wireless published a story that Motorola's project Ara is joining the Phonebloks' movement. Setting aside poetic license, I love the idea of a Phonebloks "movement". Every great idea should target the status of a movement. Martin Luther King, One Laptop per Child and the early days of PCs, to cite a few examples, all achieved the status of a movement. Perhaps Google's ownership of Motorola was all that it took to go from "crazy idea" to a community and soon a movement.
For those of you who do not memorize SF blog posts (which you should), let me remind you of Phonebloks. Phonebloks is built on the idea that instead of upgrading a phone by buying a new one, one could merely purchase upgaded components (screen, processor, wi-fi antennae, etc.) that would snap on to what Motorola calls an endoskeleton. Every phone would become reparable or upgradeable at a fraction of the current cost.
Now that Google has announced replaceable component phones, Samsung will soon come out with their take on the Phonebloks concept. Like the popularity of open software, perhaps this new variation of open hardware will inspire upgradeable TVs and printers. Just the reduction in carbon emissions from shipping parts rather than new units should motivate us to support the Phonebloks idea. Perhaps we will even see the return of electronics repairmen to swap out compnents for those of us challenged in the physical world. Turning IT into a components design and manufacturing business (ignore operating systems for the moment) would probably lead to the breakdown in the industrial clusters in China and the return of manufacturing jobs to the U.S. If most applications move to the web because of ubiquitous Internet connectivity, the complexity of computing devices including phones could be simplified. This would result in the simplification of operating systems and a reduced requirement to re-write for new components.
I pre-ordered a Palm Pilot and the first Blackberry with voice. I think a phone based on the Phonebloks concept could be a change of similar proportions.