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Project Ara delayed till 2016 with new market pilot possibly being in the US

You may remember last week when it was reported that Google’s modular Android phone called Project Ara was being ‘recalculated’ and that there was a possible change in plans coming to the project. The Project Ara Twitter account, where all of this was originally announced, also stated that we can expect more updates to arrive this week. Those updates have begun and the first one is that the release of Project Ara is being delayed till sometime in 2016.

In case you are not familiar with what Project Ara is, basically this is a modular phone that Google has been working on that allows owners to swap out the main hardware parts with other ones, sort of like you already to do with PC components. So you could have your Project Ara phone come with 1 GB of RAM, but then later you can buy 2GB of RAM in a new module, and swap the old one out with the new one, essentially upgrading your phone.

Google announced via the Project Ara Twitter today that the release of the Project Ara phones will be delayed until some time in 2016. From the sounds of things, this won’t be some massive overhaul of the Project Ara phones, since the company has already made a lot of changes to it since the project’s inception. Google stated that there has been “Lots of iterations… more than we thought”. Somewhere along the line it changed enough to change the company’s market pilot plans too.

Originally Puerto Rico was selected to host a market pilot for Project Ara, with Google themselves having 20 to 30 modules planned for the pilot as well. While details haven’t been released as to why this has changed, the market pilot won’t be happening in Puerto Rico anymore from the sounds of things. Instead Google has announced that they are ‘scouting’ a few spots here in the US to hold the market pilot instead. So bad news for anyone in Puerto Rico who were hoping to snag one of these during the pilot.

Google plans to release more updates this week regarding Project Ara, so we will be posting updates as they come out, especially if it is the new locations for the market pilot.

Websites Referenced: TheVerge | Project Ara Twitter

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