Google's Plan to Make Modular Smartphones Moves Forward

Are you ready to assemble your smartphone from individual parts? Google's Project Ara wants to make that happen, and it's just taken an important step forward with its own developer conference.

The first of three Project Ara conferences will take place April 15-16, according to the Ara site. It'll actually be held online, letting developers from anywhere join, although Google will host a small in-person gathering at the Computer History Museum near its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

When Google sold Motorola to Lenovo, it made sure to keep the company's Advanced Technology And Products (ATAP) group, whose mission is aligned with other Google "moonshot" projects: to push technology forward by leaps and bounds, not increments.

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