A Bandwagon Worth Riding

[De-Ting]

Phonebloks. A very good idea which I was surprised to see, after having already coined a similar concept in my head for a game console. Basically, it's a phone with swappable everything, that's intended to last, and cut down on electronic pollution.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDAw7vW7H0c

Let's make it happen.

http://www.phonebloks.com

 

[Green_Lantern]

Funny you should bring this up since I've been thinking about a new phone lately.

It's a cool concept actually, but I don't see it catching on any time soon, if ever.

 

[Paradox]

That's a pretty cool idea.

 

[Bretimus_v2]

Too bad planned obsolescence is part of our capitalist consumer driven economy. This is a great idea though.

 

[madster111]

There's a very good reason phones are built like they are now.

This concept will make everything more expensive, MUCH larger (all that space needed for connectors and separate heatsinks) and it's likely to actually increase pollution.

Although it sounds awesome, in reality it'll just make everything slightly worse so that you can slap a new GPU in your phone every year or so.

 

[De-Ting]

There's a very good reason phones are built like they are now.

Too bad planned obsolescence is part of our capitalist consumer driven economy.

More expensive? Depends on what you buy, and how companies price their bloks. It has the potential to be less expensive. Separate heat sinks? For what?

Slightly worse than Apple releasing a new, marginally improved version of the iPhone every so ofter? I sincerely doubt that.

 

[Affen]

Ever had your phone drop and the battery flying away? Dropping that phone and having all the pieces scatter away would be horrifying.

Cool idea. That simple way of changing parts could be used in other electronic devices too.

 

[DH_Ninja]

Ever had your phone drop and the battery flying away? Dropping that phone and having all the pieces scatter away would be horrifying.

Cool idea. That simple way of changing parts could be used in other electronic devices too.

I like the idea but I think there would be something in place to prevent something so simple from happening, after all that would be a horrific design flaw.

 

[FrozenBacon]

Excellent idea but I don't see it going anywhere, honestly. More money to be had in forcing people to upgrade, or making it trendy to upgrade (like apple does with the iPhone). It also doesn't seem like anything more than a decent idea at this point, I'll start believing in it more when they have some sort of real hardware to show to the world.

I don't buy a new phone when something breaks, though. Like with my iPhone, I just replaced the screen for about $20 when it cracked. Then again I am a computer nerd studying to be a computer engineer and I love doing stuff like that. But still, I would be nice to be able to upgrade components in the phone like a PC. We can already upgrade the storage with SD-Cards, though.

Ever had your phone drop and the battery flying away? Dropping that phone and having all the pieces scatter away would be horrifying.

Cool idea. That simple way of changing parts could be used in other electronic devices too.

It wouldn't be too hard to implement a mechanism that snaps everything into place. Instead of having the back exposed there could be a very thin cover that clamps everything down with two screws, sort of like how the iPhone is constructed, but more elegant.

There's a very good reason phones are built like they are now.

This concept will make everything more expensive, MUCH larger (all that space needed for connectors and separate heatsinks) and it's likely to actually increase pollution.

Although it sounds awesome, in reality it'll just make everything slightly worse so that you can slap a new GPU in your phone every year or so.

Not necessarily. From the diagram it looks like the phone will essentially be a giant breadboard. May be troublesome getting the parts to communicate with each other using the many different configurations, but they could set up some sort of software solution where the component ignores any signal sent on a certain "channel." across the same line. That will probably make the phone operate slower, though, since every component will have to filter out unwanted signals.

 

[madster111]

Separate heat sinks? For what?

More or less every component in the thing. Current phones are built to take advantage of only a couple large heatsinks (much like a laptop with the GPU+CPU on 1 heatsink), however if all the components are separated into individual blocks, each of those blocks are going to need their own way to cool, which means they're going to be heavier and larger.

If you don't think phones get hot, go ahead and play a game while your phone's on charge. If you do it on a hot day with an iPhone, it'll probably thermal.
Now remember that wi-fi, bluetooth and the 4G/HSPDA whatever module all create their own not-insignificant heat.

 

[De-Ting]

Update: Motorola is working on the idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaPf4ZIbDVM