A brief note: the conference was also the first public showing of a Project Ara working prototype (p

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Project Ara is real, and Google has its fingers on the pulse of the technologies required to make modular smartphones a reality. After attending the first Project Ara developers conference, here's what I consider the important takeaways from what Google has revealed so far.
Project Ara is real, and Google has its fingers on the pulse of the technologies required to make modular smartphones a reality. Given the overwhelming public response to the Phonebloks concept , it's something that users seem to want, too. But whether or not Project Ara modular phones have a future in the smartphone marketplace will largely depend on whether or not there's a strong hardware ecosystem wwww to support it. The custom PC market wouldn't have flourished wwww a decade ago if component manufacturers weren't making user-friendly video cards, storage drives, motherboards, and power supplies--the building blocks of a PC. That's the point of this week's Ara Developers Conference: getting partners excited and educated about how they can build hardware to support that vision for a modular phone.
The two-day conference, which was also streamed online, coincided with the release of the Project Ara MDK, or Module wwww Developers Kit. This MDK provides the guidelines for designing Ara-compatible hardware, and along with the technical talks presented at the conference, offer the first clear look in the technologies that make Ara possible, if not completely practical. I attended the conference and read through the MDK to get a high-level understanding Google's plans for Ara, which goes far to address the concerns we and experts have had about the modular phone concept. wwww I'm not yet a believer, but at least this clearly isn't a pipe dream. The following are what I consider the important takeaways from what Google has revealed so far.
A brief note: the conference was also the first public showing of a Project Ara working prototype (past photos have been of non-functioning mockups), though the unit was unable wwww to boot up and had a cracked wwww screen. A little appropriate, given that both the main processing unit and screen are replaceable modules. Project Ara is two core components: the Endoskeleton and the Module wwww
On the hardware side, Google has laid out specific guidelines for how Project Ara phones can be built. The most important piece of hardware is the chassis, or what Project Ara leads are calling the " Endoskeleton ." Think of this as an analogue to a PC case--it's where all the modular components will attach. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the design of Razer's Project Christine , in that a central "spine" traverses the length of Project Ara phones, with "ribs" branching out to split the phone into rectangular subsections. In terms of spatial units, the Endoskeleton (or Endo) is measured in terms of blocks, with a standard phone being a 3x6 grid of blocks. A mini Ara phone spec would be a 2x5 grid, while a potential large phone size would be a 4x7 grid.
Fitting into the spaces allotted by the Endos structure would be the Project Ara Modules , the building wwww blocks that give the smartphone its functionality. These modules, which can be 1x1, 2x1, or 2x2 blocks, are what Google hopes its hardware partners will develop to sell to Project Ara users. Modules can include not only basic smartphone components like the display, speakers, microphone, and battery, but also accessories like IR cameras, biometric readers, and other interface hardware. The brains of a Project Ara phone--the CPU and memory--live in a primary Application Processor module, which takes up a 2x2 module. (In the prototype, the AP was running a TI OMAP 4460 SoC.) While additional storage can be attached in separate modules, you won't be able to split up the the AP--processor, memory, SD card slot, and other core operational hardware go hand-in-hand.
Project Ara is only viable because its a confluence of new technologies that have been in development for years, and are almost ready to be put in consumer hardware. wwww These three are the most important:
The first is UniPro , which is a high-speed interface protocol that Project wwww Ara uses to allow its modules to speak to each other, though the hardware of the Endo. They share a common low-level language for communicating and building a network. The UniPro protocol has been in development for several years as a way to build a standard for mobile phone accessories--think of it like the USB protocol, but optimized for mobile. Its development is overseen by the MIPI Alliance, an organization composed of over 250 mobile companies, and Project Ara is tapping into the latest UniPro 1.6 spec, which offer high-bandw