Motorola’s modular smartphone concept has been a long time coming. They’re not the first company to come up with the idea but they have given it new legs. The idea is that by allowing consumers to replace malfunctioning components of their phone, rather than the whole phone itself, fewer of them end up on the rubbish tip.
It reminds me of a famous moment in Only Fools and Horses. Trigger, the show’s ‘village idiot’, is a street sweeper and wins an award for saving the council money by using the same broom for twenty years.
His secret? Effective broom maintenance. The broom’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles.
The take home message for Motorola is to make sure that the malfunctioning components can be repaired easily.
The opportunity to customise one’s phone needs to be managed carefully too. What’s to stop people throwing their old camera part away and replacing it with the latest upgraded version? The result could be much worse than the situation we have today.