Google's Project Ara wants to revolutionize the smartphone industry within a year

The night before Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) division was supposed to show off the one and only functional Project Ara prototype to a room full of eager developers, someone dropped the phone and broke the display. At any other product reveal, this worst-case scenario would be a nightmare come true. Not to Google: The company made lemonade out of a lemon by turning it into a selling point for the modular smartphone. A year from now, painful situations like this might be easily fixed by simply buying a new display and swapping out the broken one.

Not that it would've made much of a difference if last night's fiasco never happened. Attendees at this week's Project Ara developer conference wouldn't have been able to boot up the prototype and play around with it like any typical smartphone -- in this case, "functional" is not the same as "functioning" -- but at least it would've made for a better presentation. Regardless of how it looked, however, we were able to briefly handle the Project Ara prototype and some of its first modules. To be clear, this is an extremely early model and there's a long way to go before it sees the light of day, but it at least allows us to get a good glimpse of what's to come over the next year as Ara continues to prepare for launch.

Project Ara brings the modular smartphone from concept to a reality; it almost seems like it should've made a cameo in The Lego Movie. The Ara consists of a metal endoskeleton, which is essentially the spine of the phone, and slots for replaceable components known as modules, which look a lot like tiles. (If you're reminded of Windows Phone when looking at the back, you won't be the first.) These tiled modules can include anything that makes your phone tick (processor, RAM, WiFi, power jack, baseband, display and battery, for instance), as well as plenty of other features like your camera, speakers and storage space.

Today, the division announced that it's planning to ship a "Grey Phone," which is simply a prepackaged device that comes with only a screen, processor and WiFi module. From there, users can easily add and take away components as they see fit. It'll be relatively cheap -- the product would cost Google $50 to make, though retail price hasn't been determined yet -- and users on a tight budget can easily add or upgrade modules whenever they can afford to do so.