Phonebloks

Cool idea for a modular phone design, but cool ideas don’t count for much. Show me a working implementation and I’ll believe it’s feasible, let alone useful. Two other thoughts:

  • I don’t think the green angle works to sell this. They’re saying “Hey, with this, you wouldn’t have to throw your whole phone away every year or two.” But even if Phonebloks works as advertised, you’d still be throwing out old components on a regular basis, and the march of progress is such that it won’t take long until your base board is outdated too.

  • Interesting that even with its modular design, none of the examples involves a hardware keyboard. Remember when that was commonly held up as a flaw in the iPhone? Seems like a long time ago.

Update: Looks like there’s some sort of QWERTY keyboard module in one of the screenshots; I was going from the video.

★ Sunday, 15 September 2013