If you thought you were going to get your hands on a modular phone born from Project Ara any time soon, sorry, the testing phase is on hold until next year.
If you've never even heard about Project Ara, here's a quick explainer.
"So, this is a new kind of phone. It's made of blocks. Detachable blocks," said Dave Hakkens.
This project started as an idea, nicknamed "Phonebloks," in 2013. The goal was to cut down on the waste old and broken phones create.
Now the idea is one of the many experimental projects Google's adopted. And if it ends up working, you'll be able to upgrade your phone by replacing a block rather than the whole device. (Video via Phonebloks)
And everything's been going pretty well. The phone even got a demo at this year's Google I/O conference. But we learned this week that the phone didn't do too hot during the drop test phase.
The development team's Twitter account said, "No more electropermanent magnets." And then joked about failing the drop test. We know it was a joke now, thanks to a follow-up tweet that also mentioned the team is working on its humor.
Thanks to the team's Twitter account we know the magnets idea is out, but in its latest update the team said it's now testing a "signature experience." (Video via Phonebloks)
We've no idea what that means, but if it fixes the issue of blocks falling off when the phone is dropped by the time testing starts in 2016, we'll be happy.
This video includes music from “Ergo” by Birocratic / CC BY 3.0.
