Google plans to distribute Project ara boards to devs.

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Google’s Project Ara is such a drastic departure from the hardware designs that make up mainstream smartphones that it’s pretty impressive to see just how swiftly progress is moving forward on the effort. From the earliest announcement back in the fall of last year, we’ve moved on to developer conferences and the release of the Ara Module Developers Kit. Now it’s nearly time for Ara’s next phase to begin, as Google prepares to distribute the dev boards that will let hardware makers continue with work towards creating the modules that will go into Ara devices.

A few weeks back Google announced that dev boards would ship sometime this month, and now we finally see applications open. Companies and organizations creating module hardware for Project Ara are invited to submit applications for the dev board hardware that contains the circuitry they’ll need to evaluate how their modules will interact with the rest of the Ara system. The first round of applications closes in just a few days, with a second round following immediately thereafter. And just like it mentioned earlier, Google says that boards will start shipping in late July.

What does this mean for you? Directly, very little, but if you’re a smartphone fan worth his or her salt, all this Ara business has you utterly captivated, and developments like this one are big steps on the way towards the eventual launch of commercially available Ara hardware.

Source: Google