You can customize your PC, why not your phone? That's the idea behind Motorola's new Project Ara, an open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.

?wmode=transparent"We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines," Paul Eremenko with Motorola's Project Ara Team, wrote in a blog post.

Ideally, Project Ara - which has been in the works for more than a year - will "drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones."

The effort will focus on an endoskeleton (endo) and modules. "The endo is the structural frame that holds all the modules in place," Eremenko wrote. "A module can be anything, from a new application processor to a new display or keyboard, an extra battery, a pulse oximeter - or something not yet thought of!"

The team will be partnering with Phonebloks, which uses detachable blocks to create "a phone worth keeping." The site runs a Blokstore, which site creator Dave Hakkens described as an app store for hardware.

"The market of electronic devices is growing rapidly, but it feels like we are building disposable stuff," Hakkens wrote. "Every time we make something new we completely throw away the old one. Imagine all the good displays, bluetooths and speakers we have thrown away. I love the connected world that we live in and it's time to set up a universal modular platform that companies work on together."

As a result, Project Ara will combine Motorola's deep technical work with the Phoneblok community. "The power of open requires both," Eremenko wrote.

Motorola is now soliciting Ara Scouts, who will do research over the next 6-12 months about how to shape the direction of the project. "After you sign up, we'll email you about once a month with opportunities to share photos, ideas and commentary about topics relating to Project Ara," Motorola said.

In several months, the Ara team will send invites to developers, asking them to create modules for the Ara platform ("to spice it up a bit, there might be prizes!"). An alpha release of the Module Developer's Kit (MDK) is expected sometime this winter.

Motorola has already dabbled in customization this year with its Moto X smartphone, though that focused more on color options and accents through its Moto Maker website. For more, check out our recent tour of the Motorola factory in Texas where the Moto X is being assembled.

Also see PCMag Live in the video below, which discusses Project Ara.

Further Reading