Modular phone?

Modular phone?  Friend, former colleague, and Idaho mogul Doug S. passes along the video at right that describes a proposed new mobile phone called “PhoneBloks”. It's a crowd-sourced project, currently looking for funding, and it's getting a lot of positive buzz.  The premise is that we all buy new smartphones in order to get a new feature or two, and then we end up throwing away our entire former phone.  The inventor of PhoneBloks says he has a better way: a modular phone that lets you replace just the component you want to upgrade, and keep the rest of your phone.  There are other benefits as well, most especially the ability to customize your phone to your own needs and desires.

I understand the sentiment that led the inventor down this path, but I'm skeptical that his approach will work. The biggest challenge will be cost.  First, making removable modules requires connectors and mechanical support that are expensive.  I can't see any way around that one.  Even worse for this sort of device, they add volume and weight.  Second, mobile phones as they are made today are marvels of high-volume production – they are incredibly inexpensive for what you're getting, and that is only possible because of astoundingly high volumes.  Devices like the iPhone sell by the million, and that extraordinarily high volume enables low cost production.  By making a modular phone, PhoneBloks is by definition lowering the production volume of each component – a guaranteed way to increase its cost.

I'm old enough to remember a similar evolutionary path with another familiar piece of electronics: televisions.  When I first got interested in electronics, televisions were huge pieces of furniture in the house, internally powered by tubes, and full of very complicated adjustments.  There was an entire industry of television repairmen, as those televisions were so expensive that repairing them – even with expensive, skilled labor – made good economic sense.  The same arguments being made for PhoneBloks were made for televisions, and indeed it was possible for a while to buy a “component television” system, where the tuner, audio amplifier, monitor, controls, etc. were all separate devices that came in several versions – quite analogous to the PhoneBloks concept.  But component television never went anywhere, as the television technology quickly advanced beyond anything the component makers imagined, obsoleting them entirely.  Furthermore, the volume of televisions being made went up dramatically, cost plunged, and the entire television repair industry folded up and went home.  Now we just throw away our old televisions and think nothing of it, and we expect each new one we buy to be better, bigger, and less expensive than our last one.

I'm not going to sign up for PhoneBloks :)