The main thrust of the comments so far are negative, but in my opinion this was a great idea.
Phones are personal devices. Plenty of time is spent on smoothly machined surfaces, wood cases, etc. A little biosphere is a beautiful idea, and likely cost a fraction of the overall project.
And yeah some look pretty cool, a scale, iris detector, a better microphone and speaker, laser range finder, smoke detector (but could imagine perhaps other hazardous materials). Might think of other specialty application, but the problem is in any of those fields, there are probably higher quality tools already available not tied to an experimental expensive phone. They'd have to first make the phone as ubiquitous as an iPhone then start selling add-ons. Not make add-ons as as a major feature of the phone.
But tardigrades just seems like a way to get someone in management to notice and say "Wait wut, we are spending the money on this? Somebody, please defund this project".
I can think of plenty of use for modules. The problem is that none of them are general purpose. There are tons of niche applications though. They should have made an industrial phone for $1000. Lots of people would have bought them for interesting use cases that Google never would have thought of.
The challenge is that a hackable industrial strength phone is not a ten billion dollar business, which is what Google wants.
there are so many things that google markets poorly, or to the wrong audience.
glass would have been amazing for industrial or many professional jobs, wave was a collaboration tool released to individuals, and now this where people want "an input device" for a niche application and would currently pay tens of thousands of dollars for such a thing.
it's really quite upsetting that all these fantastic technologies are wasted because of this push for "social" and mass market.
Anything niche but important enough to warrant a $1000 phone that could take another $xxx component is also something that could easily have a $xxx USB-C component.
Many of the things you might want to attach don't fit into the flush form factor. A credit card reader. An ultrasonic scanner for imaging. Various medical sensors.
A phone where you could clamp sizable accessories onto one end might be more useful.
What we need is for Android device manufacturers to agree on a standard mounting point to attach a single external module. Something like a rail or magnet on the back at a fixed position relative to the USB port so that we can securely attach a peripheral without having it fall off.
Put a Picatinny rail on the top end of the phone. That's a standard way to attach stuff to guns, and there are lots of things which attach to it. Car mounting becomes easy.
These sealed aquatic systems are really cool. How do you go about finding out how much of everything you need to put in them for long term survival?
Can the biological processes of these simple organisms be modeled as checmical equations and all you need to do is balance them out and solve for the mols of everything you need to pour in?
That's why I haven't made one yet. I'd like to make one that contains a correctly proven amount of every nutrient and will, for a fact, stay alive for a long long time.
Ironically, we're doing it to ourselves at the global scale, to ourselves and tons of other organisms. It's only when the scale is so small that we can hold it in our hands, that we start to empathize.
Guessing it's a bunch of trial and error right now - these systems are pretty hard to predict in general and I'm not aware of a whole lot of research into closed ecological systems. Which is a shame really.
A self-sustaining system like we'd want should come to its own dynamic equilibrium, given a decent enough starting state, which does make the trial and error slightly more feasible, and of course they have to have some idea of the inputs and outputs of the various organisms.
There is some research on these ecosystems [1], and there dynamics [2,3]. The ecosystem is made up of a photosynthetic algae as a producer, a protozoa as a consumer, and a bacteria as a decomposer, and can be stable for over 1,000 days.
I'd say that aquarium counts as some kind of art project (art product?). Which seems like the thing you'd hire such an agency for, after you've run out of more sensible ideas.
Sad to see Ara die. I don't understand why they took three years to realise the path they were pursuing didn't work. Why couldn't they figure out earlier so they still had time to do something that works?
Google should have pursued a less ambitious and more practical version of the idea. Instead of making everything replaceable, maybe just identify one component that would be. Like the camera. Why do I have to buy a new phone if all I want is a new camera? Would a phone with only one or two replaceable components be feasible to build, and not impose too many tradeoffs?
The Ara team pursued the "everything should be replaceable" dream for too long, and failed. I wonder if a limited version would have been feasible.
It doesn't make sense that you should buy a new smartphone, priced at as much as ₹80K ($1000) even if all you want is one new component. Imagine if you had to buy a new laptop for more storage for your movies, and external hard discs didn't exist. Or a bigger screen, when you could use an external monitor. And so on.
The problem with that is that it's not just one or two components that are new iterations when you upgrade your phone - CPU, GPU, display (or, more likely, generation of protective tech on display, at this point), camera, maybe speakers, the antenna(e) could be workable barring something like a 4G->5G iteration if they covered enough to start with...and that's all ignoring the custom-shaped battery, which would get smaller to fit the modular slot.
Plus the one upgradable component that stops having feature-parity often long before the rest - software stack. The number of problems with getting random bugs out would get worse by the number of modular parts, and few Android vendors that I've seen keep phones updated for even 3 years, let alone 6.
It's been the case for a long time that you lose customization when you shrink the form factor, as you start squeezing every component down to its minimal essentials, and because it lets you start making tradeoffs you can only make if you know intimate details of the entire platform.
I would, quite fervently, like for a modular smartphone to work, and to not have to do the equivalent of paying hundreds of dollars every few years when my phone gives up the ghost or is EOL (or both). I just don't see the technology advancing that way until we get way better at miniaturization, such that fitting functionality into the phone form factor is no longer a strong pressure constraint.
Any component could theoretically cause someone to want to upgrade their phone, but in practice, some would be more frequent driving factors than others. Have you done market research to identify these?
If you were to make only those replaceable, you'd derive much of the benefit, but only incur some of the cost. A phone with only some modular parts would hopefully be not as thick as one with all parts modular. You'd have fewer random bugs, since there are fewer combinations.
Regarding software updates, that would be taken care of by a phone made by Google, like Nexus.
Concretely, how much thicker would the Pixel be if the camera were replaceable? 1mm? I'd take that tradeoff, particularly since the additional mm of thickness would result in better battery life.
Those poor tardigrades would be killed by all of the dangerous radiation coming from the phone.
Just kidding, they'd be killed by the dangerous conduction from the phone. The little guys can't handle the rapid heat changes caused by the battery and CPU.
> It turns out the myths about tardigrades — how they’re indestructible — are true, under the right circumstances. “They go into cryptobiosis. They shed up to 90 percent of their body water, turn into a little grain of rice, and that is the thing that survives in space, and that’s what survives in ice cores for 300 years, and you add water and they revive. Cryptobiosis requires very narrow environmental ranges in order to begin,” said Feehan. But a sudden change in temperature? Lab-bred tardigrades are no match for that.
Readit News
Phones are personal devices. Plenty of time is spent on smoothly machined surfaces, wood cases, etc. A little biosphere is a beautiful idea, and likely cost a fraction of the overall project.
But to be serious here are some of the other modules they planned on:
http://www.modularphonesforum.com/news/yezz-another-28-modul...
And yeah some look pretty cool, a scale, iris detector, a better microphone and speaker, laser range finder, smoke detector (but could imagine perhaps other hazardous materials). Might think of other specialty application, but the problem is in any of those fields, there are probably higher quality tools already available not tied to an experimental expensive phone. They'd have to first make the phone as ubiquitous as an iPhone then start selling add-ons. Not make add-ons as as a major feature of the phone.
But tardigrades just seems like a way to get someone in management to notice and say "Wait wut, we are spending the money on this? Somebody, please defund this project".
The challenge is that a hackable industrial strength phone is not a ten billion dollar business, which is what Google wants.
glass would have been amazing for industrial or many professional jobs, wave was a collaboration tool released to individuals, and now this where people want "an input device" for a niche application and would currently pay tens of thousands of dollars for such a thing.
it's really quite upsetting that all these fantastic technologies are wasted because of this push for "social" and mass market.
A phone where you could clamp sizable accessories onto one end might be more useful.
As for an example industrial phone here's an RFID reader Android phone for 2.5k. https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/trimble-juno-t41-rugged-rfid-...
Can the biological processes of these simple organisms be modeled as checmical equations and all you need to do is balance them out and solve for the mols of everything you need to pour in?
I find them more cruel, as you knowingly doom your pet world to die a few years later.
https://www.thedodo.com/watch-holds-captive-ants-1057364913....
A self-sustaining system like we'd want should come to its own dynamic equilibrium, given a decent enough starting state, which does make the trial and error slightly more feasible, and of course they have to have some idea of the inputs and outputs of the various organisms.
[1] http://ir.obihiro.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10322/221/1/Prot.Vo...
[2] http://www.cell.com/cell/pdfExtended/S0092-8674(12)00515-6
[3] http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.5.0410...
I'm sure NASA and SpaceX have to be doing something like this.
Forget the aquarium, how about a really strong microscope. Or a portable testing lab or a television or some kind of art project.
Google should have pursued a less ambitious and more practical version of the idea. Instead of making everything replaceable, maybe just identify one component that would be. Like the camera. Why do I have to buy a new phone if all I want is a new camera? Would a phone with only one or two replaceable components be feasible to build, and not impose too many tradeoffs?
The Ara team pursued the "everything should be replaceable" dream for too long, and failed. I wonder if a limited version would have been feasible.
It doesn't make sense that you should buy a new smartphone, priced at as much as ₹80K ($1000) even if all you want is one new component. Imagine if you had to buy a new laptop for more storage for your movies, and external hard discs didn't exist. Or a bigger screen, when you could use an external monitor. And so on.
Plus the one upgradable component that stops having feature-parity often long before the rest - software stack. The number of problems with getting random bugs out would get worse by the number of modular parts, and few Android vendors that I've seen keep phones updated for even 3 years, let alone 6.
It's been the case for a long time that you lose customization when you shrink the form factor, as you start squeezing every component down to its minimal essentials, and because it lets you start making tradeoffs you can only make if you know intimate details of the entire platform.
I would, quite fervently, like for a modular smartphone to work, and to not have to do the equivalent of paying hundreds of dollars every few years when my phone gives up the ghost or is EOL (or both). I just don't see the technology advancing that way until we get way better at miniaturization, such that fitting functionality into the phone form factor is no longer a strong pressure constraint.
If you were to make only those replaceable, you'd derive much of the benefit, but only incur some of the cost. A phone with only some modular parts would hopefully be not as thick as one with all parts modular. You'd have fewer random bugs, since there are fewer combinations.
Regarding software updates, that would be taken care of by a phone made by Google, like Nexus.
Concretely, how much thicker would the Pixel be if the camera were replaceable? 1mm? I'd take that tradeoff, particularly since the additional mm of thickness would result in better battery life.
Just kidding, they'd be killed by the dangerous conduction from the phone. The little guys can't handle the rapid heat changes caused by the battery and CPU.
They can withstand temperature ranges from 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) (close to absolute zero) to about 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C)
Battery and CPU heat output of a phone couldn't be more than 40 degrees C in variation, at a guess.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade
> It turns out the myths about tardigrades — how they’re indestructible — are true, under the right circumstances. “They go into cryptobiosis. They shed up to 90 percent of their body water, turn into a little grain of rice, and that is the thing that survives in space, and that’s what survives in ice cores for 300 years, and you add water and they revive. Cryptobiosis requires very narrow environmental ranges in order to begin,” said Feehan. But a sudden change in temperature? Lab-bred tardigrades are no match for that.