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No, I think the person you replied to meant that you can make a USB-C accessory for the phone. USB-C ports are on phones, in fact the majority of new Android ph

• vidarh 10y ago
  Yes, but that also has the advantage of not tieing you to the phone, and not tieing you to a specific phone. At the very least, if someone wants to make a componentised phone like this, they should make (at least a subset of) the interface electrically compatible to USB C, so you could have a cheap/simple mechnical adapter to use most modules with any USB C capable hardware to widen appeal. Some sort of standardized form factor for small embeddable hardware with dimensions that makes it feasible for one of the "carriers" could be a phone would be interesting. In fact, doing it by starting with creating some dev boards with various functionality + the adapter first, and only considering a phone if/when it gets traction could make it viable for someone to bootstrap or do on kickstarter. The problem was going straight for a phone which has pretty much no advantages applicable to a large enough group of users to be viable until/unless there's a large ecosystem of interesting modules first.
  • LeifCarrotson 10y ago
    > At the very least, if someone wants to make a componentised phone like this, they should make (at least a subset of) the interface electrically compatible to USB C, so you could have a cheap/simple mechnical adapter to use most modules with any USB C capable hardware to widen appeal. Good point. I see the Ara project as trying to pioneer PCIe for phone modules. If a lot of phones had Ara-compatible modules, that would be great. It's just that there's only Ara right now.