Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

Perhaps the technical challenges for Phonebloks will be too great. However, a modular design is more than achievable if you don't mind reducing the number of blocks.

Imagine you have 4 blocks: screen, battery, file storage, logic. Each of these could easily be connected in a modular way, and in the case of batteries, already are in a good number of phones. Whilst you might lose out on some of the customisation flexibility that the Phonebloks concept showed, you do get a number of decent benefits...

1. Replacing screen if damaged or wish to have an upgrade. 2. Can upgrade storage space without upgrading the whole phone (SD cards are a decent way to augment storage, but the proposed method offers the chance to expand beyond the limits of SD cards). 3. Replacing the logic block only allows you to have an upgraded phone customised quicker than buying a new phone (no need to migrate contacts, settings and media). 4. Battery upgrades should be the norm anyway, it's wasteful to throw away a phone just because the battery no longer holds a decent level of charge, plus it allows for extended battery capacity upgrades.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#5

Post by regularfry » Sat, Sep 14, 2013, 10:33 AM UTC

So far I've not heard "this can't be done." All I've heard is "I don't know how this might be done." Huge difference there. I also hear a fair bit of "this shouldn't be done", which I find incredibly disappointing.

Here's a hypothetical: we already know how to do noisy, shared-media device interconnects. It's called 802.11. Look at the size of wifi adapters: you can get a usable signal that works over meters from something the size of a USB plug. Now, imagine that doesn't have to include an aerial, or much of an amplifier, because even if you get a dodgy connection you're transmitting fractions of a millimetre into a chunk of metal, and you're looking at something that can be shrunk down to well within the scale Phonebloks needs, for pennies a block.

With something analogous to a router running a zeroconf system on the baseboard, it's not even particularly difficult to see how you might handle service discovery from the blocks you plug in.

Again, this is just a hypothetical, but it's just one way Phonebloks could technically be coerced into existence. I don't claim to know about any economic reasons, but there's a saying: those saying something can't be done should stay out of the way of those doing it.

So, less knee-jerk negativity please, it's far more entertaining to try to figure out how this could be done than to wallow in a brief moment of superiority by writing it off.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#6

Post by azatris » Sat, Sep 14, 2013, 10:37 AM UTC

It's also an appearence issue. Most women I know tend to choose their phone by its looks. Phonebloks would not appeal to most of them ("I see the screws!") and thus it is not a very marketable phone.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#7

Post by arbus » Sat, Sep 14, 2013, 10:39 AM UTC

This idea seems like it would be a much better fit for tablets rather than phones.

You have much more room to play around with on a tablet and perhaps the typical usage patterns of the tablet actually encourages you to swap out your bloks for different purposes.

For example, I could switch to a better but more power consuming Wi-Fi module when I'm at school which usually has crappy coverage but could then swap that out for longer duration battery so that I can watch shows on the train ride back home without compromising on screen brightness or risk the tablet dying before I get home

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#8

Post by agumonkey » Sat, Sep 14, 2013, 10:44 AM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #5

So far I've not heard "this can't be done." All I've heard is "I don't know how this might be done." Huge difference there. I also hear a fair bit of "this shouldn't be done", which I find incredibly disappointing. Here's a hypothetical: we already know how to do noisy, shared-media device interconnects. It's called 802.11. Look at the size of wifi adapters: you can get a usable signal that works over meters from som…

Maybe there will be too much data-protocol and energy overhead if communications goes through this. Smartphones could be very modular if they weren't so thin, even a USB2 pseudo backplane for everything but the screen and cpu would be enough. Maybe in a few year optic based chip interconnects (ala thunderbolt) will be cheap enough to have pluggable very high bandwidth components in a handheld device.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#9

Post by pivnicek » Sat, Sep 14, 2013, 10:45 AM UTC

This is a great idea. Own your phone. Right now, the phones we have feel like they are the corporation's phone and not ours.

I love this idea, and hope that they get enough interest to make a splash.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#10

Post by jwarkentin » Sat, Sep 14, 2013, 10:45 AM UTC

I never figured it would be done in the way it's presented. I like it because there's a lot of potential. And if a lot of smart hardware engineers start working on it, we can develop something way cooler. I want to see companies recognize that people like this idea and start moving in that direction. I would love for this to spark pressure that moves us away from monolithic solutions and towards something more modular.