The idea behind Project Ara has been floating around for ages: Why should I throw out a perfectly good smartphone for just one feature?
An Industrial Design student named Dave Hakkens managed to solidify that idea into one instantly-understandable image, a phone with components that snap together like LEGO bricks. It was such an effective idea that he was hired by Motorola, a subsidiary of Google, who’d been working on a similar idea in-house. And as Time reported last week, they’ve got it to the point where they have a functional prototype and they think they’ll be able to launch it in 2015.
But this is The Game Fanatics. There’s one question on your mind: can I play games on it?
And the answer is… sorta?
Ara is a Google project, which means it’s running Android. And in spite of efforts like Ouya and Kindle tablets to change people’s minds, iOS is still THE mobile-OS gaming platform, and Android just kinda gets whatever succeeds on iOS enough to justify porting to other platforms.
On the other hand, literally 30% of all iOS app store submissions these days are Flappy Bird clones. If you’re willing to wait, and willing to put up with the limited selection, maybe Android is a better experience. It’s certainly the platform of choice for emulation enthusiasts, due to the more open app store, although emulation is still something of a crapshoot regardless of your platform choice.
One of the biggest appeals of mobile gaming to developers is that you don’t really need Gaming Hardware(TM) to buy games. As much as EA and Epic and Nvidia try to push the limit with graphics-intensive demos and games, the popular mobile games are things like Threes, Angry Birds, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Telltale’s episodic offerings, or even more niche titles like Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery and Wrestlejump… even the most visually intensive titles are games that do more with art style than with processor power. Horsepower simply isn’t what makes a phone suitable for gaming.
And that’s a good thing, because Project Ara isn’t Google’s attempt at a high-end smartphone to compete with Samsung, HTC, and Apple. If anything, it’s the successor to the Moto G—a good, but cheap, phone that’s intended to appeal to “emerging markets” (big-business speak for “India, China, and other countries American companies use for cheap labor”). If it goes over well in the US and Europe, well, that’s just a perk.
The other big benefit of Project Ara is customization, cost reduction through only paying for the phone features you want. They’re engineering Ara so it isn’t just modular, but hot-swappable. You could, in theory, use it for a bigger battery—or even use it to swap out for a faster processor when you feel like gaming and then back to a slower one to save battery life when you’re just listening to music. Developers could even create custom hardware for a specific game—maybe something like the Wii Vitality Sensor, maybe just an analog stick on the back of the phone.
The key word there, though, is “could.” Like with any platform, you get some support based on unique capabilities, but most of the support comes from a sizable user base. Ara is unlikely to offer any unique gaming options unless it takes off—we’ll find out whether or not it does in 2015.
