Global Cell phone manufacturer
Motorola announced a project ‘Ara’ last year.
Ara project aims for developing free
hardware flat form, all smartphone will be completely modular, customer can
choose every components, such as display, keyboard, battery, camera, and etc.
Final product would reflect 100% customer’s preference.
@http://motorola-blogspot.kr/2013/10/goodbye-sticky-hello-ara.html
@http://motorola-blogspot.kr/2013/10/goodbye-sticky-hello-ara.html
Motorola has been working on this project
for already 1 year,
and is planning to collaborate with modular smartphone
concept ‘Phoneblocks’.
Phoneblocks front side @ en.wikipedia.org
Motorola announced that prototype of Ara is
pretty close
and components will be on sales at ‘Moto Maker store’ website.
We assumed that Motorola owns related
patents portfolio, so WIPS tried to search related patents using WIPS Global
service but could not find them. Actually modular smartphone related patents
were already developed by ‘Modu’ and its patents rights were transferred to
Google.
Granted number of below patent is ‘8180395’,
and title is “Modular wireless communicator”.
representative drawing @wipsglobal.com
We searched family patents, and it turns
out to be 135 cases in total,
including 73 cases in US and 1 case in Korea.
Family status of US 8180395 @wipsglobal.com
What the volume of family patents indicates?
Filing patents costs lots of money, and if the patent owner want to maintain
its right, cost grows even higher. So it is easy to tell that patent with more
family is equivalent to greater economic value. If the value can be created
from the patent is not big enough to offset easily the cost of maintaining it,
nobody would file a family patent.
As we can see from above patent
distribution map of WIPS Global, this patent owns many family patents, expected
to have big market potential.
Let’s wait and see what kind of revolution
modular smartphone will bring to
current competitive smartphone market!
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