New Kickstarter is offering a modular cel phone kit/parts, and the higher reward tiers offer “hackathon” bulk packs of the parts. Thought there might be enough interest from enough members to think about pooling $ and ordering one of the $479 or $5000 reward tiers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seeed/rephone-kit-worlds-first-open-source-and-modular-p
Considering how much trouble Google has had in pulling this off, I have to wonder how these people will fair?
The answer to that question is “Not Well.” Entering the cellphone market successfully is very hard, especially since cell phones are the loss leader product for service providers in the United States. It doesn’t really matter how good the phone is unless the service providers want to carry, sell, and market it. I wonder when the shift will happen from getting your phone from your service provider to owning your phone and choosing providers at will. I know it has started, just not quite there yet.
Cool post Paul and I hope it turns into a cool product.
This is different than what Google is doing. Instead of a very powerful ARM processor with gigabytes of RAM, this thing has much more modest processing power.But it is intended for different uses. This thing is essentially an Arduino with cell phone technology welded on. The base module is an Arduino with GSM and BLE. So it can access the Internet through a cell phone network (3G, Edge). You can add functionality on an as needed basis.
Ever see on of those electronic signs telling you about a missing elder who got lost driving? Hook up a base module and a GPS unit. When the car is running, it periodically wakes up, looks for any messages coming in and reads the GPS and goes back to sleep. If grandpa goes missing, you send a message to it and itt responds with the last few locations. From that you have his location speed and direction. You could even use Google Map to see where he is.
The possibilities are endless.
As a science fair project, that sounds promising. However, a commercial device is more demanding. PC World has a relevant article,
“7 reasons why modular smartphones are such a nightmare to develop”
Apples and pineapples. It isn’t intended to be a phone, although it could be used as one.
Seeed Studio is not a cell phone manufacturer. Nor do they plan to be. They are more like Sparkfun or Adafruit.