Google's Motorola has unveiled Project Ara, an open hardware platform for building modular smartphones.

The idea behind the project, led by Motorola's Advanced Technology and Projects group, is to turn almost everything in a smartphone — display, keyboard, battery, processor — into a module that can be replaced.

Motorola envisions two basic components of such a smartphone: an endoskeleton (or endo), the structural frame that holds all the pieces together, and the modules which are fitted on the endo.

The concept should give you, the user, the power to decide what goes into your phone: how it looks, how much it costs and what it does. As Motorola puts it, all of this should do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software. The results should be a third-party developer ecosystem and faster innovation, among other things.

If the project sounds familiar, you're probably thinking of Phonebloks, Dave Hakkens' proposal for a modular smartphone. Motorola knows about it, and plans to leverage the rich community around Phonebloks for the design of Project Ara.

Motorola has been working on Project Ara for a year. Immediate plans involve sending an invitation to developers to start creating modules for the platform in a couple of months; the MDK (Module Developer's Kit) should be coming "sometime this winter."

Images: Motorola