I recently sent my ancient brick flip phone to the graveyard (the desk drawer that contains all my broken and obsolete gadgets) and took the leap into a beautiful Samsung Galaxy S4 - what a difference in technology to say the least, not to mention price. Frustratingly we all know it is really easy to break one and the smartphone companies are coming out with new technology as quick as you can open the box, rendering your new bit of tech obsolete. What if there was a way to avoid this type of frustration?



Dave Hakkens, a designer from the Netherlands has developed a concept that would do exactly that. His concept is simple really; a totally modular phone with separate "parts" that can be swapped out, removed, or upgraded, depending on the needs of the user. Kotaku points out that when they make a faster chip or a better screen, you could simply buy a new chip or screen without replacing the entire phone. If you just want a lot of disk space or battery juice and don't care about your camera, you could sacrifice the one for the other.



Laughing Squid says that the parts can also be customized to fit individual users’ needs. For example, if you do everything using cloud-based services, you can swap out your storage block for a larger battery block. Phonebloks is currently still in the concept stage, but Hakkens is working to drum up support for the idea at the Phonebloks website and Thunderclap.

Kotaku makes another good point by noting that Phonebloks doesn't seem to be designed with profitability in mind, which would make it a tough sell for cell phone manufacturers. Also is it even possible to engineer something like this? (Though if they can put a fingerprint scanner on an iPhone, surely someone could make something like this work?)

This is a very intriguing idea and I am very interested to see if it goes past the concept phase.