Phonebloks

I really, really want one of these.

Well you’re in luck. Motorola’spartnered with them.

That is actually pretty cool.

It’s the world’s least waterproof phone!

No, seriously, to me it sounds like they’re promising things they won’t be able to deliver. Fully customizable? Yeah right. To get the best of X, you’ll have to compensate and get less of Y and/or Z.

I.e.: at first I wanted a high quality camera, but then I found out the battery life is absolutely poop because of it, so I want a bigger battery also, but that means I have to shuffle some blocks around to make room for the battery, but because I shuffled stuff around, the camera block doesn’t fit the panel anymore, so I either have to get a smaller camera or get a smaller CPU block (or maybe a bigger panel).

Nope, not having high hopes for this, I’d rather stick to the closed iPhone or the semi-open Galaxy-TV-sized-iPad-Phone.

Yeah it sounds nice, but it also sounds like an engineering nightmare. Maybe with Motorola behind this it could get somewhere, but I’m taking “I’ll believe it when I see it” route with Phonebloks. To me the concept just looks like it’s introducing more problems than it’s solving. It’s almost certainly going to be bulkier, slower, more power-hungry, and more unreliable than current smartphone designs.

So, basically any modular version of an existing technology.

Aw, when I saw the page name I thought it was gonna be about that new Brick phone they were producing for the hipster crowd. What a shame…

Sort of, only worse. This thing would probably have to break the laws of physics and economics to make it smartphone-sized, smartphone-priced, and smartphone-powered. It’s more or less impossible. I don’t want to pessimistically shoot down anyone’s dreams or ideas, but sometimes you just need to step back and ask yourself if this can even be done, and if it can, is it gonna be worth it? Can it be made as good as I envisioned? Is it going to affordable? Will people want to buy it if it’s expensive and/or inferior to the competition? Is it really going to reduce waste? Can I make this big enough that it will change things? How much might this make me, and how badly could it break me? Things like these need to be considered.

It’s good to dream. We need ideas to drive innovation, and we need people willing to take chances on ideas. Even the people with the technical expertise to research and develop new technologies often turn to sci-fi for inspiration, and will lament the lack of good ideas from fiction. But you have to temper that imagination with reason. I’m sure 20 years ago when the Next Generation was in its heyday there were plenty of people trying to figure out how to make a tablet computer like the crew of the Enterprise used. So why didn’t we get tablets and smartphones and such right then? Easy - the technology simply wasn’t there. I don’t deny that one day such a concept as Phonebloks might exist - but right now it just doesn’t seem feasible.

I think you’ll find that the main thing keeping modular (or at least durable) things off the market, or keeping the price up, or keeping the quality down, is business models (i.e. profit$$$$), and not practicality.

Companies produce things that break quickly and in closed systems because it ensures a small product lifecycle, which ensures high margins of profit.

So yeah, this is very possible. Maybe not this particular concept, but something like it. Will it happen? Probably not, at least not depending on big corporations like Apple or Samsung or probably Motorola.

Well, I’m not particularly qualified to speak about the practicality of this design, but I keep reading posts from electrical engineers everywhere I see Phonebloks mentioned about just how much of a challenge it would be to make something like this. Not all of them say it’s flat impossible, though many do, but all acknowledge that there are a lot of hurdles to overcome.

But even a minimal amount of experience with computers will tell you that this is a radically new idea. Even PC’s which are modular are nothing like this. You can’t cram a video card into a processor socket. Everything is specialized so that it can be cheaper and more efficient. Just imagine the complexity and redundancy you’d need to make a computer motherboard have this level of interchangeability - you’d have to be able to plug the power supply into the same socket that could be used for memory or a video card or a processor or a hard drive.

Make no mistake, there are definite engineering obstacles to overcome, and that’s on top of the challenges on the business side of things.

With the improvement of technology,there are more and more electronic products appear in people’s daily life.We have to admit that the mobile phone make our modern life better and more convenient.However the cell phone sometimes cause new problems and breaks up people’s peaceful life.To create a quiet condition, the cell phone jammer can help a lot.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.