Google announced on the Ara Developers Conference that it wants consumers to be able to test a prototype of its modular Project Ara smartphone. The search giant announced it will first start with a pilot in the Latin American country Puerto Rico.
Google's director of engineering, Paul Eremenko, showed a slide stating that Google aims to launch a third prototype after the current Spiral 2 prototype. When the third prototype has launched the test in Puerto Rico will start as early as this year. The actual launch of Project Ara for consumers should take place after 2015, which likely means 2016, although Eremenko didn't explicitly mention that year.
Google wants to start with a pilot to get answers to questions on what consumers experience when using the modular phone and what the company can improve. The search giant also wants to prevent users from regretting which specific modules they picked. Furthermore, Google wants to determine which pricing model it will use for Project Ara.
The third prototype will no longer use a SoC of Marvell or Nvidia but Soc from Rockchip with Cortex A7 cores and native UniPro support specifically designed for Project Ara. Despite that, Google expects that the Ara phone will consume 25% more power than a regular Android smartphone.
Engineers of Motorola and Google have been working for years on Project Ara. It won't be the first modular phone on the market, an Israeli company tried it before with a phone called Modu, but it never became a success.
