If you could build your dream smartphone, what would it look like? Now suppose you could put it together yourself.
That's the promise of modular design, a new concept that would basically let you snap together different phone components like Lego blocks.
Say you want a great camera. Snap! A vivid screen and good sound because you watch a lot of video? Snap! But maybe you could live with a smaller battery because you spend most of your day at home or work. Snap!
With modular design, you could just pay for the components you need instead of settling for whatever manufacturers put in their designs. You could just upgrade individual parts as they wear out or become obsolete.
LG is dipping its toes in the modular concept with its upcoming G5 smartphone, announced this week at a wireless conference. The bottom of the phone pops out to let you swap in new hardware. For starters, you'll be able to attach a camera grip with physical shutter buttons or insert a high-fidelity audio system if regular MP3-quality sound isn't good enough for you.
Google's Project Ara is also outlining a modular-design approach that starts with a structural frame and lets you add cameras, sensors and batteries.
A Dutch start-up called Fairphone is selling the $US580 ($A800) Fairphone 2 online. Though it comes assembled, you can replace the screen for less than $US100, or the camera for $US40. An expansion port will let people add components - perhaps for wireless charging or mobile payments - that Fairphone or outside parties make in the future.
But there's no guarantee the idea will take off.
For one thing, many consumers want phones to be thin, light and power efficient, and that means all the parts have to be tightly integrated. You give that up when you go modular.
Modular design also isn't easy. Project Ara has suggested in cryptic tweets that designing modules has proven more complicated than expected.
Ronan de Renesse, lead analyst for consumer technology with the research firm Ovum, says many parts in smartphones are designed specifically to work together. Swap in a new camera or screen, and the older processors might not know what to do with it. The camera might stutter, the screen might blink, and both might drain the battery faster than expected.
Lego-like parts also could allow dust or water to intrude into the phone's innards. Their connections might also give way over time.
"I don't think those phones are going to be reliable enough for the mass market," de Renesse says.
However, even if the appeal is limited, the concept could have broader influence.
LG's Frank Lee says perhaps one day people will be able to swap in a slower, but more power-efficient processor on days they'll be away from chargers.
In the future, he says, "We won't be referring to them as phones any more."
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