This is the dumbest idea ever. It's astonishing that a major OEM like Motorola would give it the time of day, much less "partner" with yet another wannabe product designer whose main skills lie in making CAD renders of things which are impossible to build. Do they have any engineers advising the marketdroids over there?
For those who have your hopes up, I hate to break it to you but even if they ever ship anything (doubtful), it will suck. Forget about regulatory hurdles, the real problem is that it will be more expensive than conventionally constructed phones, it won't perform as well, it will be less reliable, the software will suck, it will be heavier, and it will be bulky. Oh, and it probably won't be very mix and match in the end.
A few years ago I got hired by a fabless semi company to work on the first SoC of my career. After that chip taped out, I got to watch how difficult it is to deliver software for a complex SoC, since we're in a market where many customers need the chip and software as a package deal. The chip is somewhat like a phone SoC in complexity except for not having a GPU, and the software we have to deliver is less complex in some areas (no GUI) and more in others (networking).
So I can tell you that it's hard even when the software team has to integrate just one SoC with a small number of off-chip peripherals in a very limited number of configurations. The "phoneblok" concept blows up the number of potential combinations of hardware and software. There is a reason why (to pick the obvious example) Microsoft has to maintain huge testing labs doing WHQL driver certification, and that's just the tip of the iceberg in the PC market.
Since only a tiny number of geeks really want to build their own custom phones out of lego-like "bloks", there's obviously not going to be any entity with the resources (or motivation, same difference) to spend what needs to be spent on software integration engineering. It's not like the PC industry where the ecosystem of interchangable parts grew organically out of the PC's origins in the 1980s; this is an established market where the gold standard is a highly integrated phone, and it's easy to see that the public loves them and for the most part won't switch. It follows that either your choices of "bloks" and how to combine them are going to be very limited, or the software is going to suck. Or (most likely) both.
Finally, the idea that everybody on the edge of tech is just "testing around" is a kid's naive idea of how the industry works. In fact, the idea that this is even on the edge of tech is naive. You seem to nobody knows how to make it work yet, so you just shrug and declare it a valid effort. Actually, my objection is that it looks an awful lot like things that have been done before, and based on past experiences it's easy to predict how this will go without adequate investment. (Which is unlikely to materialize, since ultimately this is a classic solution looking for a problem nobody had.)
(1/3 ain't bad)
