Google demonstrates prototype hardware for Project Ara

Project Ara is a project being worked on by Google at the moment which is a modular smartphone concept where the goal is to swap out components and upgrade them as needed, much like how one would upgrade their desktop PC by swapping out RAM, hard drives, and GPUs. Google will be hosting their first Ara Developers’ Conference in April, but in the meantime it seems that they are too excited about it and have decided to show off some of its early prototypes along with a demo on how it would work.

Project Ara is only just getting started, with the first dev conference still over a month away, but we’re understandably excited about the sort of possibilities the project promises to offer. We have a long way to go before any of this starts approaching the phase were it might be ready for commercial deployment, but that hasn’t stopped Google (and Motorola before it) from sharing with us some images of its early design prototypes. At the Launch festival in San Francisco this week, Google’s Paul Eremenko took to the stage to talk a little about Ara and offer a demo of how the hardware might work.