Modular smartphone
Project Ara
to get competition from a startup called Vsenn
Whenever one talks
about modular smartphones, the only name that comes to mind is Project
Ara. But that may soon be a thing of the past, as upcoming startup Vsenn is also promising to come
out with modular smartphones.
Vsenn is a company
founded by former Nokia Android X project manager. The home page of the
website does not show any prototype image of the Vsenn modular smartphone. But
it has a mission statement as follows: Our mission is to give everyone the
power to create their perfect smartphone by using modular and upgradeable
hardware.
To that effect the
company promises modular smartphones which let you swap the battery, camera and
the processor/RAM. You will also get a guaranteed updates on a plain
vanilla Android handset for four years after you have purchased one. That is a
long time considering the yearly cadence adopted by most smartphone makers. But
since you can swap and replace parts of the phone, four years seems logical.
The Vsenn modular
phone will also provide security features such as triple-layer encryption right
out of the box. “For your safety and protection we provide free access to a VPN
network and secure Cloud. Preserving data integrity and your privacy is our
main priority,” says the site. Apart from this you can customise the
phone according to your preferences.
Project Ara on the
other hand has seen a lot of progress since the time it was announced. Google
has been releasing
updates and videos around Project Ara which has everyone
interested of this new form factor in the smartphones segment. In fact quite
recently we saw a video showing a Project
Ara handset booting up.
While a consumer
release of Project Ara handsets is still some while away, it will be interesting
to see what Vsenn will come up with.