How Motorola Made Modular Smartphones a Reality

(lively instrumental music)

The first era of smartphones are all like this,

clean and simple, but kind of one-dimensional.

So, how do you differentiate when everyone

has essentially the same phone?

Like this, or more to the point,

like this.

Motorola's new phone, the Moto Z,

is the result of a years-long project

to build a modular smartphone,

one where you, the user, get to decide

how it works and how it looks.

You can add speakers that actually have some bass

or a battery pack when you know

you'll be using your phone for hours

or a pretty decent projector.

And Motorola achieved all this

by giving developers full access

to the entire smartphone functionality.

That includes every connector and every chip

so that when you attach a mod,

it's not like plugging in an accessory.

It's like adding a new piece to your phone

and then securing it so that it feels like one piece again.

The first principle behind the prototype

was make something that is truly thin and light.

To give it the tensile strength that we needed

to make sure that the phone did not actually bend,

we had to reinvent a special kind of steel

on the back of the device to make sure

that we can actually build a device

that's 50% thinner than our existing designs.

[David] Throughout the design process,

Motorola had to rethink almost every part of the smartphone.

Engineers had to move the antenna

so you're cell service wouldn't be blocked by the mods.

They also got rid of the headphone jack

and they came up with a way to use magnets, pins

and even that big camera hump

to make it really easy to attach and detach mods.

And they worked on making it really, really easy

for other people to make mods.

So, we took a lot of inspiration from Raspberry Pi

and we were able to come up

with essentially a full-blown board

that a developer doesn't have to build on their own.

It has a Porsche board and you can build

on top of the board itself or your own application.

[David] And for all this to work,

Motorola needs to build a huge ecosystem of mods

and help people understand the value

of a modular phone in the first place

which is harder than it sounds.

Really, this is all one big grand experiment,

but maybe it's also the next best step for smartphones.

The whole reason smartphones like this are great

is that their app stores let you do a million things

with your very same device.

Isn't it time our phone themselves worked the same way?