Move over, Project Ara: the Puzzlephone wants to make modular smartphones even simpler

With Project Ara and Finnish startup Vsenn promising to bring modular smartphones to the world sometime next year, it’s only fitting that another Finnish entrant, Circular Devices, enters the ring with a modular smartphone of its own. Dubbed the Puzzlephone, the handset provides an alternative concept to Project Ara and Vsenn by emphasizing simplicity and approachable pricing.

The Puzzlephone is broken down into three main components: the Spine, the Heart, and the Brain. The Spine is comprised of the LCD and speakers, while providing the basic structure of the phone. The Heart, meanwhile, is where you’ll find the battery and secondary electronics. Finally, the Brain contains the processor and camera modules.

Related: This startup wants to take on Project Ara with its own modular smartphone

The project has been in development since 2013, though Circular Devices as a company was formally founded in September 2014 and is based in Espoo, Finland, where Nokia is headquartered. According to Puzzlephone’s website, the company is now at a point where it can produce working prototypes, though mass availability won’t happen until the second half of 2015. Even so, Circular Devices looks to undercut its competitors by selling the Puzzlephone at a mid-range price, so long as the funding and support is there. The pricing could undercut Vsenn, which plans to sell its modular handset for under 590 euros in Europe.

Circular Devices is intent on setting open source standards with the Puzzlephone, even though the company will utilize a forked version of Android for the first go-round. This runs contrary to Project Ara, which will surely use a stock version of Android with a few changes here and there. At their cores, however, the philosophy driving the Puzzlephone and Project Ara, as well as Vsenn’s modular smartphone, remains the same: the drive to lower electronic waste.

As things stand now, if the camera on your phone is damaged for some reason, there is no way to fix it, even though the LCD screen and processor may still work fine. That’s just one example. These modular smartphone companies hope to change this by building phones where you can swap out components you want to replace without throwing the whole thing away. Whether the Puzzlephone will be successful is another matter, but with Project Ara, Vsenn, and now Circular Devices all entering the modular smartphone space, things will get interesting in the years to come.

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NPD: Consumers flock to supersized smartphones

Remember the Razr? Yeah, we barely do either - and there's a reason. Consumers wants big screens on their smartphones.
Market research company NPD is reporting that when it comes to consumer smartphone preference, the bigger the better. Tiny, sliver-sized phones have become a thing of the past and people are now willing to sacrifice space in favor of richer, larger, fully-featured media experiences.
According to NPD’s claims, the demand for phones with displays ranging between 3.5 and 3.9 inches have leveled out, but consumer interest in those with 4-inch screens or larger is on the rise and besting its smaller competitors. In its press release, NPD points to devices like the Samsung Galaxy S, HTC Evo 4G, and Motorola Droid X as just a sampling of the smartphones that were able to grab 24-percent market share. Analysis also shows that “the market share of smartphones with screens smaller than 3.4 inches declined from 63 percent in Q4 2009 to just 36 percent of the smartphone market in Q4 2010.”
NPD also reported that the bestselling large display devices were the Evo 4G, the Droid X, the Fascinate, the Captivate, and the Vibrant. And apparently, while men are more likely to spring for the larger screens (their pants have much larger pockets, we’d like to point out), woman are taking up with the trend as well. Over the last year, women went from being responsible for 30 to 40 percent of supersized smartphone sales.
With app development becoming increasingly innovative, data storage expanding, and resolution improvements on the rise, the devices are obviously so much more than phones – so it makes sense to slap a 4-inch display on them. Get much larger than that, though, and you’re looking at a tablet. Maybe we’re heading for a future in which consumers forsake smartphones altogether in favor of 7-inch tablets! Steve Jobs would be kicking himself.
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