“The benefits of this approach are obvious” Imagine a smartphone that’s made up of a series of smaller, Lego-style bricks. Each brick represents a different component of the phone, such as the battery, the processor or the camera, and can be easily attached, rearranged and swapped out in seconds. This was the idea behind Project Ara, Google’s plan to build a smartphone that you could assemble, take apart and upgrade yourself without any technical knowledge. However, despite showing several working prototypes, after three years of development, Google unceremoniously axed the project. Ara was the poster child for a whole movement of modular tech, with companies big and small not just developing smartphones, but customisable wearables, headphones, computers, drones and more. Although some examples of modular tech are proving fruitful for…
