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November 04, 2013

Google Prepares for Its Mobile Future

Two different announcements last week offered clues to how Google will handle mobile devices in the future, with Android 4.4 KitKat offering configuration flexibility (and the ability to fit within only  512 MB of memory) and Motorola's Project Ara outlining a path for customizable and potentially lower-cost handsets.

KitKat has cleaned up and simplified Android from a user interface perspective, but the latest Android release has been optimized to work on lower-end, smaller memory devices. This isn't to say 4.4 can't power the latest and greatest smart phones, but even the hottest hardware benefits from smaller apps that don't take up as much memory.

Google wants to have a single version of its OS across all Android smart phones, rather than the annoying forking that has taken place in the past. A single OS means hardware and software developers have a much simpler task of write-once, run anywhere. 

 Lower-cost mobile devices and watches are where 4.4 will shine and where the "next billion" smart phones will be sold. In addition to less memory consumption and the ability to make apps tune behavior to a device's memory configuration, there's support for hardware sensor batching – the ability to reduce power based upon what the device is doing.   Hardware sensor batching can be used to optimize battery life by sensing if the phone is moving and tailoring activity of CPU and radios accordingly. Squeezing more battery life out of a device is a necessity regardless of what part of the world you live and work in.

If Android 4.4 is the software piece to simpler, lower-cost phones, Motorola's Project Ara provides the hardware – literally. Motorola wants to bring modularity to smartphones with an open hardware platform. The company says opening up hardware will create a "vibrant" third party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation and "substantially" compress development times.

The IBM PC created an open ecosystem that drove competition and new ideas. Instead of a standard PC bus with slots that third-party boards can go into, Ara will be composed of an endoskeleton – a structural frame – and modules. Build a new phone by starting with the "endo" and customize with modules to fit.

A phone manufacturer should be able to build a variety of phones for different markets, with handset costs driven downward due to commonality and economies of scale. Handsets also become more portable between regions, with the ability to easily move a "comfortably used" endo and other bits to a different region and reconfigure it with a module or two. Turning a stock smartphone into a medical device becomes a simple module swap.

Given the relatively saturated smartphone market and Google's desire to bring its services to billions more people, rolling out all the pieces for lower-cost devices over the long term makes a lot of sense.




Edited by Blaise McNamee


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