Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Phonebloks: Explained!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here and a certain video has been floating around the internet. Recently, it’s called phone blocks has more than 8 million views more than 150 000 thumbs up and more than 20 000 plus ones. So let’s go ahead and break this down. This is phone blocks explained. So phone blocks is the idea of a totally modular smartphone. It stems from the notion that when people get done with a smartphone and it’s time to replace it, it’s usually because of a single reason – maybe it’s getting too slow or they don’t like the camera anymore or maybe the screen broke and they throw out the entire Phone, even though the rest of the phone is probably still perfectly fine, and that creates a lot of unnecessary waste. So the phone blocks concept is a sort of a central motherboard or base that all the rest of the parts will plug into in a sort of a block shape and they all fit together kind of like legos.
This way, if someone decides they don’t like part of the smartphone or if they want to change a certain thing, they don’t have to throw out the whole phone just like legos. They can actually just remove and reattach and rearrange the parts of the smartphone to create exactly what they want makes perfect sense. What’S different about this, video is it’s half tech concept, half social media campaign, essentially, what they’re doing is asking everyone to build up the hype on social media about phone blocks until a certain day when everyone will talk about this concept. Kind of reminds me of the kony 2012 campaign from a while back, but either way it doesn’t matter what it reminds you of. At the end of the day, it’s working and it’s getting a lot of people’s attention, and this is the first time i’ve seen this dream phone concept actually catch the eye of a lot of regular people like this as part of the campaign they’re asking for you To sign up for a service called thunderclap, where, once you sign in on a social network, everyone who signs up will have their account automatically send out the exact same tweet or facebook, post or google plus post at the exact same time on the same day. So far more than 300 000 people have signed it.
So that’s going to be quite a trending topic on that day. So there are a couple of logistic things to consider about phone blocks. Number one who’s going to make the blocks in the concept video. They showed that they wanted to get the attention of and work with very big companies, big manufacturers already and get them to make phone blocks so that people can put parts from trusted manufacturers in their custom phones, so speaker, choices from bose, harman, kardon, bang, olufsen beats By dre, whatever camera choices from sony samsung, maybe canon processor choices from intel, qualcomm, ti, etc, and that would make sense. But there isn’t really any incentive right now for these companies to buy into it. They’Re all invested right now in making their own products, because that’s where the margins are, and speaking of margins number two. This is a very expensive concept. Building a phone, the equivalent of the samsung galaxy s4 on paper, for example, out of phone blocks, would end up costing probably twice as much, and it would be a much much larger device.
This is because smartphone makers right now have something called the supply chain, where they’re just cranking, hundreds of thousands, even millions of identical smartphones off the assembly line. The devices they’re making have a very specific, extremely compact design if you’ve ever taken apart a phone or even just looked inside the back of one you’ll see these parts are tied together, really tight, woven in between each other and crammed in there to keep the phone Thin and light and efficient, and also pretty with this final smartphone design, the more smartphones they crank out, the more streamlined the process gets and the lower the costs get the more money they save, but building individual smartphone parts like the gyroscope and all the sensors and The camera parts and the battery without weaving them together, that’s going to be a very big and very expensive smartphone. So here’s the thing about phone blocks, while the idea itself is really cool and very positive and the motives are all great. The logistics behind it are damn near impossible to pull off right now. But that’s not the point, that’s not what this is about.
Like we said earlier, phone blocks is really just the idea of a completely modular smartphone, there’s no kickstarter, no indiegogo, no actual funding and there’s no actual product. There’S no physical prototype, there’s no pre-order. This is just an idea and foam blocks.
Is a campaign to spread this idea through as many people as possible to inspire the idea of a modular smartphone being the smartphone of the future? Essentially, it’s not a brand new or revolutionary idea. It’S just the first time. This idea has been packaged into a two-minute youtube video with sweet, animations and 3d graphics that everyone can understand, and i hope this does really well, i’m excited. I love the idea of a totally modular smartphone and spreading this idea to as many people as possible gives it hope, and it’s being pretty successful right now at doing exactly that.
So that is phone blocks explained. If you want to check out more information about any of this stuff, i’ve talked about i’ll. Have all the relevant links right below that like button, so you can check them all out and i’ll also include my latest video about what i say is the perfect smartphone i’ll, also throw in a much older video.
I did with my own video idea about a modular smartphone, so if you check that older video out you’ll probably see that the ideas here are strikingly similar and also have the youtube channel linked below to the guy that did this, so you can check out all The other stuff he’s done and all the other projects that weren’t uh, quite as successful as phone blocks, has been so far either way. Thank you for watching this video. If you want to see more like this definitely subscribe, because there are a lot more coming thanks for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace you .