Motorola Leader In Modular Phones – Company Commits To 12 Add-Ons Per Year

First Posted: Dec 06, 2016 05:00 AM EST
Close

Meet the Moto Z. For the uninitiated, this is Motorola's flagship attempt at cellphone modularity. The current model is specifically designed to take on a plethora of add-ons. These add-ons range from battery life extenders and pico projectors to personalized camera peripherals.

The company wasn't the first to explore modularity. LG released their G5 last earlier this year and had its fair share of praise and flack. Despite not being the first to release such phones, Motorola has buckled down and decided to step up its game. The Lenovo subsidiary has publically committed to releasing at least a dozen new Moto Z modular add-ons every year.

The director in charge of the Moto Mods, John Touvannas, stated in an interview with Cnet that their company is slated to release more modular add-ons next year, 2017, than this year. Third-parties have already expressed ready interest in this endeavor, with partners such as JBL getting into the game. Motorola also has plans to collaborate with Indiegogo, a well-known crowd-funding platform, to crowd source creative idea generation and to hand out Moto Mod developer kits to promising innovators.

"Moto Mods developed today are designed to work with future generations of Moto Z phones," noted Motorola in its blog post related to interconnectivity and backwards compatibility. Although not a guarantee of newer generation Moto Mods working with older Moto Z phones, the implication is there. This is a much more pertinent issue following Motorola's scheduled renewal of the modular Moto Z later in 2017.

Nevertheless, the very nature of modularity somehow ensures that any newer Moto Mods and add-ons should be usable on the older generation Moto Z phones at least for the near future. Software updates should fix most compatibility issues for now. With all this, Motorola is shaping up to be the frontrunner in the modular cellphone market, outpacing LG who all but abandoned modularity almost as soon as it released its phone.

Although Lenovo's Motorola will have to do some improvements with their designs - as is want to happen with most ground-breaking innovations - the potential is definitely there.

See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone

©2017 ScienceWorldReport.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The window to the world of science news.

Join the Conversation

Real Time Analytics