Google set to hold a developer conference for its modular smartphone platform, Project Ara, in April

Google is set to hold its first Ara Developers’ Conference in April at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

If you’ll recall back to the heady days of October, when Motorola and its Advanced Technology And Projects group was still a part of Google, the OEM announced Project Ara, platform for modular smartphones. The idea to be make available the separate components of a device for users to change and upgrade when they see fit, cutting costs, increasing customization and extending the life of the product.

When Google agreed to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, it opted to keep ATAP in-house and independent, and they have since gone on to announce a separate project, Tango. But Ara is far from dead, and Google is holding its first Ara Developers’ Conference over two days, on April 15th and 16th. The first of three such conferences in 2014, this one will offer an alpha release of the Ara Module Developers’ Kit (MDK), a “free and open platform specification and reference implementation that contains everything you need to develop an Ara module.”

According to the official website, “This first version of the MDK relies on a prototype implementation of the Ara on-device network using the MIPI UniPro protocol implemented on FPGA and running over an LVDS physical layer. Subsequent versions will soon be built around a much more efficient and higher performance ASIC implementation of UniPro, running over a capacitive M-PHY physical layer.”

For non-developers, Google will offer a livestream of the keynote and developer-focused sessions.

[source]Project Ara[/source][via]Google Plus[/via]