Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group — the only part of Motorola that Google didn’t sell off Lenovo — is finally ready to show off a new, fully working prototype of the Project Ara modular smartphone. The prototype, shown in the video below, appears to be a polished version of Spiral 1, which made a brief public appearance in June at Google I/O. Perhaps most excitingly, though, the Project Ara engineers say that they’re almost ready to show off Spiral 2, which will make the prototype from the video look like a potato.

In the video, Dave Hakkens — who published his concept of Phonebloks just before Google announced Project Ara — visits NK Labs in Boston, which appears to be a design partner that Google has outsourced some work to. A nameless engineer from NK Labs walks us through the process of designing and testing of Project Ara modules, and then eventually slots some modules into a prototype handset and turns it on.

The prototype shown by NK Labs seems to be a more polished version of the Spiral 1, which was first shown at Google I/O. Back in June, it appeared to be made of translucent, poorly fitting plastic, with external jumpers and switches poking out. Now, it almost looks like a real phone — a beige, bulky, ugly phone, but still something that you could conceivably use. At the moment the Spiral 1 appears to run a version of Android Jelly Bean (~Android 4.1), but the production version (or at least the next prototype) will apparently use Android 5.0 Lollipop.

Obviously, though, even the tidied-up version of the Spiral 1 is a far cry from Google’s initial Project Ara concept art. Right now, about 50% of the Spiral 1’s bulk/volume is “taken up for the modularity” — in other words, the price of modularity is extra chips, connectors, and protective covers that all take up more space. With Spiral 2, though, Google’s ATAP is working with Toshiba to make “custom chips” that significantly reduce the overhead of modularity, so that “most of the area” is available to module developers. Obviously, that’s not much to work with, but we should find out more when the Spiral 2 prototype is officially unveiled at the Project Ara developer conference in January 2015.

The purpose of the Project Ara developer conference is primarily to get developers thinking about — and ultimately making — novel modules for an as-yet-unannounced modular phone. The exact form factor of the final phone is unknown, of course, but Google has decided on enough specifications and standards that there’s already an early version of the Module Developers Kit.

Even with Spiral 2 on the horizon, there’s no word on when (or if) Google will commercialize a modular phone. Like Tango, Ara is just one of Google’s many R&D projects. This isn’t to say that we won’t eventually see a modular Nexus phone — but such a device is probably a year or two away at the very least. Considering Project Ara was only announced a year ago, I’d say things are moving at a respectable pace.

As I’ve spoken about at length in the past, I think modular, upgradeable smartphones are the future of mobile computing — and, assuming conventional keyboards and displays aren’t replaced, possibly the future of personal computing in general.

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