[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On 27/09/13 10:35, Rob Beard wrote:
When the generic smartphone I'm waiting for from China arrives I'll tell you if it looks like a brick. As I understand it these cheap Chinese phones are possible because they are made up of fairly standard parts and they all look a bit boxy and non-descript, which is OK by me. Take it one step further and standardise the footprint of the individual parts and you have phoneblocs.On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 09:26:17 +0100, George Parker <georgeparker20@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:On 27/09/13 08:26, Simon Waters wrote:http://phoneblocks.com/ Anyone else think this is a great idea ?I suggest we do the same thing with computers. We could have stuck with ISA it was good enough. Oh and stuck with AGP. No one needs to movebuseson. Here in lies the problem, it would be massively difficult to build a phone like that, more difficult than producing a much better phone that people would prefer. And harder still to make it flexibly upgradable. Also purely by volume I suspect mobiles are far less of a problem inthewaste stream than other devices. Even if you change your mobile every 2 years you'll only have 50 in 100 years, which is only around a kilo or two of waste, most of which would be high value, even repairable and resellable if only 2 years old.I think this has been done with desktop computers to some extent. They are effectively a box in which you can put whatever modules you want, from whatever manufacturer you want, stitched together by the motherboard. And it has been hugely successful. You could still have a computer with ISA and AGP if you want. Apple have tried to stop this by closing down their design. Laptop packages are too individual for it to work but they could be made in the same way, but that would mean manufacturers cooperating instead of competing.Actually a few years back manufacturers worked together to create a standard way of upgrading video cards on laptops. Sadly I don't think it really took off. But on the other hand some components are easily upgradable such as wifi cards, drives, memory. Even on Apple kit it's still not that locked down (okay well the iMac is a bit if on some models if you don't use a specific Apple drive, IIRC it was something odd to do with temperature sensors, other drives would work but the fans in the machine would go crazy). As for ISA and AGP, I don't think many folks want that anymore. They seem to have gone the way of VESA Local Bus EISA and Micro Channel Architecture.The only thing I can see against it is "style". I think at least 50% of Apples success is to do with fashion, style, cool, marketing, call it what you will, and in our current culture this will always be so. But I believe our current culture is unsustainable and will have to change.I'd agree with that, buying shiney for shiney's sake. :-)My vote is for phoneblocs. There is no reason why this appliance manufacturing method should not be applied across a lo of consumables, and indeed once was. It was called maintainability and is the opposite of built in obsolescence.I don't know, have you taken a phone apart? There's really not much room inside them and they're fiddly to work on. If an idea like this was to work chances are it would look ugly as hell or be the size of a brick. Rob
George -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq