Project Ara might not be ready for actual use, but that hasn’t stopped Google from announcing the first 100 beta testers of the device. The kicker, they’re getting the modular phone for free. On its dscout site, Google says that over 90,000 people signed up to be “scouts.” Of those, the company selected the top 100 most active scouts to receive the phone. A statement in the announcement says that “over the next 8 months, Google will continue to refine the Ara prototype.” That puts the release of the device sometime in March 2015. Not surprising considering that the ATAP team had difficulty booting up the phone at I/O.
It appears Google’s ambitious modular phone experiment is moving into the next phase. At Google’s I/O developer conference, the Advanced Technology and Projects team was able to boot a Project Ara device in public for the first time, and now it seems that the project has announced the first 100 members of the public to get a prototype. When Project Ara was announced in October 2013, Google’s (then Motorola’s) ATAP team invited users to join a program it called “Ara Scouts,” which recruited volunteers from the public to complete challenges through an app calledDscout. Most of the “missions” centered around how phones are used in daily life, for example, “Mission 6: Stuff I Always Carry Around.” According to the announcement page, the one-hundred users who will get a prototype device for free were selected based on their performance and activity in the Dscout program. However, it is unclear when those lucky Ara Scouts will be receiving their prototype devices. I’ve asked Google for more information and will update if they get back to me.
