Google to test its first modular smartphone

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) ― Google announced Wednesday that it will unveil a modular smartphone in Puerto Rico this year as part of a pilot program that will allow people to choose their own hardware based on their needs and interests.

The company will partner with Mexico-based carrier Claro and local carrier Open Mobile to offer the product, which will be sold from free-standing stores that look like food trucks, said Jessica Beavers, a Google marketing executive.

She said Puerto Rico was chosen in part because more than 90 percent of households on the island of nearly 3.7 million people use a cellphone and 77 percent of Internet access occurs through mobile devices.

“All of this makes for a truly interesting carrier landscape,” she said at a module developers conference at Google’s headquarters in California. “Mobile devices are a huge part of daily life” in Puerto Rico.

The pilot program is still being developed, but Beavers said she envisions stores first opening in the capital of San Juan, followed by Ponce, the island’s second largest city. Stores would eventually open in other cities.

Google would manufacture and sell the phone frame as well as modules created by individual manufacturers that can be added to it like Legos. Modules would range from a screen to a camera to speakers to even a pedometer, depending on people‘s needs.

“We want people to walk away and say, ‘That was really freaking awesome,’” Beavers said.