Google's Modular Smartphones; now build one as per your requirements!

There is no shortage of genuinely good smartphone options on the market. However, if you want to stay completely up-to-date, you’ll have to toss your old phone once a year in order to buy the new model. Unlike building a PC, you can’t switch out the parts to keep your rig fresh. Google aims to remedy that issue with its modular smartphone experiment, Project Ara, and now that project is closer than ever.

The modules are, of course, what makes or breaks a modular phone — without them, the phone would just be a lightweight shell riddled with empty compartments. Each module is a component integral to a smartphone — the camera hardware, the SoC, one or multiple batteries, and so on — and consumers can pick which component they’d like to install. Basically, instead of the limited configurations of the iPhone 5S and Galaxy S5, you can purchase whatever kind of phone you want. Better yet, you wouldn’t have to upgrade your entire phone the following year when new models hit the market, because you can simply buy a couple new modules and slap them in.

The frame of the phone, which Google calls Endo, will come in three coffee-style sizes — mini, medium, and large. The larger the phone, the more modules it can fit. Google doesn’t appear to have a problem with modules not uniformly fitting the phone frame; the camera can be a raised bump coming off the flat plane of the back of the Endo, or a pulse reader can stick out of the top like a Square credit card reader. Sure, it’ll be ugly, but you could swap out modules on the go to get that uniform body back when it’s time for the phone to go back into your pocket.

To get an idea of what exactly a modular phone is, watch this video: