Project Ara delayed because it broke apart when dropped

Earlier this week Google announced it was pushing its Project Ara modular phone tests into 2016, but wasn’t kind enough to inform the world as to why.

In a pair of tweets posted from the Project Ara account on Wednesday, the team admitted the solution had failed the drop test and a “signature experience” was now being tested as a replacement.

This project by search giant is aimed to develop an open hardware platform for building highly modular smartphones.

Google’s Project Ara modular smartphone just can’t catch a break, with plans to use fancy electropermanent magnets scrapped after they struggled in testing.

Google’s Project Ara team took to Twitter last week to confirm that it was still “busy making stuff” but it would no longer launch in the Latin American country and would have more details soon. Want NFC? Snap in a module for it. Want a high-end camera? The company did confirm though that the planned test run for this year has been delayed and will now be conducted in 2016.

Project Ara is still well underway despite the delay, and the team is still working hard on the device. But it also may mean that the core modules will be more expensive, since they may have more of the guts of a phone (perhaps grouping together the processor, memory, and storage, for example). Project Ara modules on the front of the handset were supposed to be held in place with latches, but modules on the back would be held magnetically.