Google Inc (GOOGL)’s Project Ara Has Come A Long Way

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL), in its quest to bring to market seemingly crazy projects, may just be about to change to way you see and use smartphones soon.

According to Josh Lowensohn and Nathan Ingraham of The Verge, the latest prototype of Project Ara which they got their hands on at a conference regarding the project shows that Google has made progress with this moonshot project.

For those who are unfamiliar about Project Ara, it’s one of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s ambitious projects that essentially wants to develop a hardware and software platform backbone for a smartphone which will allow its users to swap out key components of the devices whenever they want.

If this project becomes a success, one may soon have a smartphone that would allow them to easily upgrade say the processor or RAM or display of the devices once a better version is available in the market.

“We just got our hands on a very, very early version of a Project Ara device. It’s come a long way since its introduction in 2013, and even more since Google showed it off at its developer conference last year. Now it looks less like something that came out of a 3D printer, and more like something you could actually use,” Lowensohn and Ingraham write.

Nonetheless, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) still has many months to go before they have a viable product for introduction to the consumer market, the writers note.

Lowensohn and Ingraham said that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) did not actually have a working prototype of Project Ara’s “Spiral 2” version because its touch functions were still being worked on but both implied that the project had a lot of potential.

According to Lowensohn and Ingraham, the “Spiral 3” version of Project Ara will add 4G LTE support and more modules to the fray. Puerto Rico is where Google will test the device in a consumer market sometime during the second half of 2015, they said.

Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Capital owned 166,810 Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) shares by the end of 3Q2014.