Welcome to the second annual Verge Hack Week. We're totally blowing up our site: we've given our reporters and editors the entire week to play with new tools and experiment with new storytelling ideas, while members of our amazing product team have gathered in New York to help build all sorts of interesting new things. Learn more.

Earlier today, we learned that Google's strange and beautiful Project Ara is facing some delays. Project Ara phones, which we first played around with in January, are designed on a model of near-total modularity. Instead of buying a whole phone, you start with a metal skeleton, then snap in blocks for the processor, camera, screen, and so forth. This theoretically accomplishes two things: it makes phones endlessly upgradeable, and it allows for whatever bizarre combination of features a user or third-party developer might desire.

Sadly, the few combinations we've seen are relatively quotidian, at least for a phone that you can turn into anything. I mean, two cameras? A USB charger? Some new sensors? That's it? This recent delay, though, gives us room for hope. What kind of new, mysterious modules might have thrown a spanner in the Google works?

Project Ara now isn't supposed to enter public testing until 2016 at the earliest, but some options — accessories, special coatings, and cutting-edge specs — seem so blindingly obvious that we're surprised Google hasn't announced them already. While the precise details remain unsettled, I've taken the liberty of reviewing a few of the most likely combinations below.

This is my next modular phone: