Toshiba Shows How Project Ara’s Modularity Can Be Applied To Wearables

Google’s Project Ara is a pretty unique and interesting concept. The idea is to allow users to continuously upgrade their phones and swap out parts to create the phone of their dreams. For example right now we are pretty much limited in terms of customizability. For example you might like this phone’s design, but its camera is somewhat lacking, or you like a set of features from a particular brand but feel that its hardware could be better, and so on.

Those are the kind of problems that Project Ara wants to address, but at the same time could Project Ara be applied to wearable technology as well? It turns out that Toshiba might have thought of something like that. During the Ara Developer Conference, Toshiba’s Senior VP and Technology Executive, Shardul Kazi, took to the stage where he revealed a concept in which Ara’s modular components could be taken out of the smartphone and inserted into a wearable device.

For example if you wanted to use your smartwatch to play music, you could take out the storage unit from the smartphone and plug it into your watch and allow it to access the data on it. You could even swap out sensors, like accelerometers, gyroscopes, or maybe even health-related sensors like heart rate sensors and so on, depending on your needs.

However this is only a concept at the moment, as pointed out by Kazi. He also stated that nothing of the sort was in development right now, but it’s still a very interesting idea and it certainly does open the door to all sorts of possibilities. Of course the first step would to actually release the Ara smartphone first, which Google estimates to be in January 2015, but in the meantime what do you guys think of this idea?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Google, project ara, Toshiba, Wearable Tech