So, safe to say you’re not in the market for a new Mac Pro ;-)
That got me thinking about Intel’s thunderbolt interface. Fast, small, and universal. You could type very fast on a keyboard. 
There are also security ramifications to having easy access to basically the core bus of the computer’s ram and devices.
Sounds like a prediction for a science-fictiony hackery type device that someone could plug into a breadboard phone and own it completely.
Perhaps instead of the modular phone, we have the monolithic slab of phone (like we do now) but a nice interconnect to make it part of a larger dock thingy for your full-sized computer? Soon it should be cheap enough to wedge 500 GB of flash drive into a phone, right?
Jesus fuck, yes, this.
RED video camera rigs seem a lot like this; everyone has their camera configured with slightly different devices hanging off of it. That is because cinematographers need the flexibility to reconfigure their cameras differently for each day’s shooting. And they have the budget to afford lots of accessories that will be obsolete in a generation or two. Few should need or want to reconfigure their cell phone every day, nor would they put up with the noisy fan on the RED that is the dark side of the overly-powerful computer inside that enables the flexibility.
Remember, batteries too are chosen to fit space and power requirements for a widget. A battery that would actually fit inside everything would be too bulky for some and/or too wimpy for others.
But you can get pretty close to that now with the battery-driven USB chargers, now that half the universe is able to recharge from USB. It isn’t instantaneous as swapping out a battery would be, and it’s one more thing to carry, but it is available off-the-rack in many stores with your favorite battery brand’s name on it… and with appropriate USB adapters, it’s a one-size-fits-many solution. Your supermarket may not have it, but your pharmacy might.
(Or, if you want DIY, hit Instructables and/or Make for the “minty boost” circuit.)
SLIDE OUT QWERTY KEYBOARD?! Shut up and take my money!
I was thinking of a rechargeable battery as a replacement part that is (and remains) easily available and hopefully cheaper, not so much disposable batteries instead of recharging on the road.
Yes, of course it would be a compromise, but I still think in many cases there would be a place for something like that. But perhaps both those devices and the battery technologies involved have to mature a bit before it becomes viable.
Take your pick. Either it’s a rechargable (and you have to charge it – but you certainly could use rechargables to power the booster box), or it’s a disposable and you buy it at need. Or, with some of the newer battery technologies, you can buy precharged rechargables … but it’s still easier to drop those into a booster than to come up with a universal design for a battery when the needs – and the tradeoffs – of devices are so different.
You’re never going to get a perfect solution. As batteries become better, devices will be redesigned around the new capabilities and all that will happen is that the tradeoff points move, not that they cease to exist.
Not really… have you seen his other work?
http://www.davehakkens.nl/work/
Consumer electronics is not really his field.
As a thought experiment, it’s worthwhile even if it isn’t practical. Understanding what can’t be done is part of understanding what can be done, and looking at the idea behind it (rather than the specific solution) may offer ways to address some of the desires even if this isn’t the right solution.
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You keep bringing up the booster box that has absolutely nothing to do with what I meant. I am not talking about buying instead of recharging. I am talking about replacing the stock battery when it eventually wears out or rotating a small number as is commonly done with proprietary camera batteries.
What I really like about people’s responses is that people explain why it won’t work, why it isn’t practical and why it will cost too much.
What I don’t see are people saying the idea itself is stupid. Is it?Maybe it is. But this is coming from a user who thinks of what he wants and why he wants it. They want to customize a device at the hardware (and probably software) level.
They didn’t do the research into the issue of bus speeds, integration issues, manufacturing costs. If they did they might have just said, “Well that’s impossible” and just stop. Or maybe they did and said. “It’s impossible TODAY. But is it impossible tomorrow?”
They though about the hardware as modules that can be used to customize just like they people add software to customize their phones. Maybe they need to think of them as “fungible”
Now, let’s, for the moment, accept that this IS a good idea and that millions of people will like this idea. Instead of telling me why it 'will never work or be too expensive. Could you answer the questions. What would you have to do to make it work? It’s an engineering challenge.
Let’s say you have the resources of Apple and the entire smartphone industry. What problems would you need to solve?
Backplane bus speeds
Varying clock speeds of different parts.
Connectivity issues.
OS issues
Integration issues
Cost issues
Manufacturing issues
If you are given the challenge it might require you to “think differently” on hardware. Maybe you use Graphene, the new super material. Could be both battery and memory? Imagine that! Maybe other hardware that does does double duty?
How about connectors that are also processors.
What if things just are impossible? “But Captain you would have to defy the laws of physics?” Well then its impossible, unless…
Maybe someone would have to look for breakthroughs in other areas to make this dream come true. maybe the phone could be composed of multiple purpose circuits that can be software reconfigured. You “grow” your speakers out of general /memory or battery circuits.Speakers that double as batteries.
Does this sound like science fiction? Maybe, but if you look at cutting edge materials and maybe it’s not so far fetched.
But the issue is, "Is this a process worth trying? What if the consumer demand is huge? What if someone says, "Hey if you put your money where your mouth is and give us 700 million up front and we will make it.?
We had to invent some stuff to go to the moon, right? Maybe this isn’t a moon shot worthy idea, but think of it as an engineering challenge.
“In theory, practice works just like theory. But in practice…”
I’m an engineer. I need to work with what’s available, or what I think will be available in the near future. If I look farther out, I’m guessing – and yes, that is science fiction. Nothing wrong with exploring “what if”, but if there’s no path to get us there (and “speakers that double as batteries” is definitely a “no path”) it doesn’t give us anything useful to do with the idea.
As I said in another post: Taking a step back and looking at what problems he’s trying to solve, and whether there’s any reasonable way to solve them, is perfectly reasonable. Taking this specific proposal… sorry, but by the time you’ve invented enough things to make it work you’ll also have invented enough things to completely change what you’ll want to do with them.
When planning a moon shot, you don’t start with a specific solution. You start with a set of goals you want to accomplish. Then you design a way to meet those goals. Which usually involves coming up with a LOT of ideas that look very pretty in theory but just aren’t achievable in practice, learning from those, throwiing them out and trying again.
Modular gadget as experimenter’s platform? Sounds great, and we can make it work if you don’t mind paying for the flexibility. Modular gadget as serious solution to obsolescence? We can make that work too but, again, it’s going to require that you pay a lot more than the dedicated replace-it-when-you-want-to-upgrade device will.
Quality, Service, Price: Pick any two.
Why? Granted us techies want to have bleeding-edge everything, but the majority of phone users could safely ignore the upgrade treadmill if they weren’t having the latest-and-greatest shoved in their faces when their old phone craps out every year or two. You don’t need LTE, wireless-N, military-grade GPS, and a Retina display to make calls, text, browse Facebook, or play Angry Birds.
Phones are still changing pretty fast, but the basic technologies are already starting to stabilize after the flurry of innovation that came when the smartphone market exploded. What’s going to kill this in the market is that the manufacturers don’t want hardy, upgradable technologies. They want flashy, non-backwards compatible incremental upgrades and planned obsolescence, because that’s how they convince users to re-buy every year or two.
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On a related note, I am eagerly awaiting the day when the back of my desktop PC has twenty USB 6.0 sockets and nothing else.
Well, maybe a fan. But that’s it.
Ah, gotcha.
Problem is, designing for interchangable batteries at all adds to the size and weight of the object… connections must be made, the battery must be made robust enough to withstand handling, you have to worry about the battery shorting out (at current energy densities, that isn’t a laughing matter – websearch will find videos showing high-density batteries igniting or exploding), and generally it isn’t compatible with the ultra-compact implementations we’re demanding of phones. Cameras allow more space for batteries, AND generally aren’t drawing as much power, so they have more flexibility in this regard.
It’s engineering… The bad features of a design are usually not malicious, but are the result of trading away one thing to achieve another. If you’re willing to go back to phones being the size of a small camera, sure, we can do it. My Palm Treo has batteries I can swap out., but it’s rather chunky by current standards.
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I was ready to be excited about Jolla, but I read everything on their website down to the press releases, and it says nothing. The only meaningful information I can find about the device itself amounts to “Jolla is a smartphone that uses an OS you’ve never heard of and lets you hotswap part of the hardware to change a bunch of stuff that’s already easy to change in software.” That’s not promising.
Well, batteries tend to only last a couple of years because batteries suck. The display you can probably keep for a good long while, but the CPU/GPU combo will be out of date and insufficient for modern apps. I ran into this with my original iPhone (2G model) which basically ran out of steam after a couple of years. Cameras seem to get better with each iteration, and I certainly wouldn’t mind improved low light performance for instance. Bluetooth and wifi are pretty much unchanged, but those are a relatively tiny part of the phone. Cell technologies keep moving on as well. The iPhone has already gone through two generational shifts in cell technology (EDGE to 3G, 3G to LTE) in the short time it has been around. Storage tends to just fill over time as you buy more music and apps and take more photos or videos.
I love the concept and was thinking something similar should work just like upgraded computers, but what happens when this thing falls on the floor?
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