Google's Motorola has unveiled Project Ara, an open hardware platform for building modular smartphonesThe 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 goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it. With a Project Ara phone, modules can be replaced one at a time. Want a new Bluetooth model? Just snap it in. New battery, camera, processor? Easily done. 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. 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. If the project becomes a consumer-level reality available to billions of users, the effect on the smartphone industry as a whole could be very interesting indeed to witness. For one, it could affect the rate at which manufacturers release new models. Assuming the prototype functions well enough to continue, and assuming the public launch is received well — which is still a long ways off — this could be a major win for consumers over the long haul.