If the CPU is disconnected from the device it will not continue to function. Failing gracefully is the best you can do and even that is incredibly hard. Are you going to give the CPU its own battery so it can keep its cache when removed?
I believe this is like an eternal prototype, not meant for mainstream.
Make a fat, ugly device with low battery life and experiment with different concepts.
I assumption is they'll take learnings from Project Ara and apply it to a new, 'production' phone that has like a detachable camera or something.
BUT, that was for one vertical application which the complete application stack is under my total control - all configurations are sync when in hot standby mode.
Android system which anyone is able to install any type of Apps are completely different stories. The design will be much more complex to handle all the cases - I am not sure if that's even possible.
It is a good science project - not sure about any commercial potential.
http://blog.phonebloks.com/post/101254153023/video-project-a...
I'm not sure what you're asking here. I was talking about the design/construction challenges. If they are successful the product wouldn't be designed to crash, no.
Isn't the whole point of project Ara that you can disconnect components and the phone doesn't crash?
> you'll lose performance as data is transitioned in and out of generic interfaces
I was thinking about this - I doubt they'll have a single interface that is generic enough to attach CPU and memory as well as other peripherals - I'm guessing each connector will bundle separate connectors for the CPU and RAM, so that whichever slot the CPU and RAM modules go into, they'll still be on "their" bus. Then you'll have the generic bus, which will be like a USB or PCI bus on a computer - you can attach anything else to it and it's all treated the same. The performance loss would come from the bus itself being inferior, not having to shoehorn disparate devices into using it.
> There is no empty space, a Project Ara phone needs room for connectors, housing, and similar. Where does this space come from?
No doubt, these will be larger phones.
> I genuinely hope they succeed and I'd buy a Project Ara phone if they can engineer something [awesome]
Me too :)