StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Certainly an interesting concept, if it can be made to work.

That's...that's genius. They can certainly count on what meager support I can provide

Hey, cool, a phone like a PC.

I do love this idea.

+1 here. I like the ability to customize. I can never have too much storage with me. Fuck you Iphone with no SD expansion slot .

I don't see how this could possibly be cost effective, given the technological challenges.

Have a look at the circuit density of an iPhone:


In a 'Phonebloks' phone, those integrated circuits are essentially being split off on to separate circuit boards, which will then need additional circuitry.

Some brief thoughts:

• You are going to need way more pins for each module. More pins means they have to be smaller, which makes the interconnects more fragile and prone to being broken by users putting them in (think processor sockets).
• Speaking of the pins, if you want the modules to be placed in arbitrary configurations, then you need to design a generic pin layout that will work for all of them. Every module will need at least a power and ground rail (possibly more than one power rail, unless you want to do voltage regulation in every module). Further, you now need to implement all the (generic!) bus circuitry in the base board of the phone, which to be reconfigurable, would probably require something like an FPGA. This is going to be really really slow and expensive. Signal integrity is an important thing to consider at high clock/data speeds and would be shot to hell by such a design.
• Because each of these modules is so much bulkier than when they were on the same board or package, it isn't actually going to improve upon waste output, assuming you still want to upgrade the components of your phone. The phone will need to be bigger than anything else on the market to give the same performance. If you buy all the modules individually to upgrade your phone to the next generation, the price will be higher than a new phone, not to mention the extra packaging for all these individual modules.
• How are you going to ensure interoperability of different modules? Sure, 'open source platform', but what about keeping drivers up to date, cooperation between manufactures and inevitably having to upgrade the expensive parts anyway when a peripheral comes out that isn't supported.

The reality is that modern embedded devices are moving more and more to "System On Chip" - where traditionally a microprocessor, ROM, RAM, Wi-FI and so forth might be separate chips, it is now common practice to put it all in the same casing and often on the same piece of silicon. Coupled with bus speeds and signal issues requiring very special consideration, I can't see this gaining traction.

If the various modules were constrained to very specific places on the board, then this might be somewhat viable. You don't get to switch the processor, but you might be able to upgrade/replace the camera, speakers, battery and storage (which is already the case in modern phones for the latter two).