Elemental Modularity Design in Smart Phones

Abstract

Current statistics show that there are around 2.53 billion smartphone users on this Earth in 2018, which is predicted to rise upto 2.87 billion by 2020. Since the birth of the mobile phone in 1940s, the development in the technology was driven by technological advancements. Now, there is a factor of the social movement that partially drives the innovation in the phone technology, catering the subjective “ease of access” of maximum users. An average mobile phone user is spending around 3.1 hours per day on a phone i.e. 93 hours in a month which explains why there is a need of considering social trends along with technological innovation while designing the product. But taking everything into account, the past few innovations in the mobile phone industry were noticeably constrained to a few monotonous principles, and hence arises a need for revolution. One revolution in the software industry was initialized by the open source movement which points towards a theory for solving this tediousness in the hardware industry and paves ways for concepts like modular phones. Modularity means the degree to which a system’s components can be separated and reassembled hence a modular phone is a smartphone in which different functional pieces can be swapped out. The concept promotes open sourcing movement in hardware sector and increases the complexity of the system but decreases the sophistication for the end user. This paper will demonstrate modularity as a concept, its present and future scope and an experiment-based hypothesis to create a generic modular phone based on any OS.