Modular phones are certainly a popular idea right now, even if they’re currently failing to deliver on their promise. But there’s already a suggestion about what could happen to their parts when they’re no longer wanted: they could simply slide together to form a supercomputer.
This a concept design by the chaps behind the modular smartphone Puzzlephone. The idea’s simple: as processor units from the phone become too slow to individually keep up in a mobile device, they can be combined — simply sliding into a scaleable supercomputer unit — in order to create a device that supplies computational grunt on the cheap.
Indeed, the concept even suggests that old battery units could be used in the modular supercomputer too, presumably allowing the device to go mobile, or at least carry on crunching numbers through a power cut. While the proposed units only accept a handful of processor units, the concept also explains that supercomputer units themselves could stack together.
This is, of course, just a concept. But it’s a neat idea, and at the very least it’s nice to see the manufacturers of modular phones thinking about how they can make their hardware sustainable, rather than disposable. [Puzzlephone via Verge]