It's Happening: Build your own smartphone and decide what your phone does, how it looks and how much it costs.

Google's Motorola has unveiled Project Ara, “to develop a phone platform that is modular, open, customizable, and made for the entire world".

The idea behind the project, led by Motorola's Advanced Technology and Projects group, is to turn almost everything in a smartphone — display, keyboard, battery, processor — into a module that can be replaced.

"We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines," said  Motorola Advanced Technology and Projects group, Project Ara Team.

Motorola have recognised the opportunity for innovation and personalisation.  They want to give you, the user the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks and how much it costs.

Motorola will be working with Phoneblocks, which recently showed off a similarly ambitious concept for modular smartphones; the Google-owned hardware manufacturer says that it plans to engage with the Phoneblocks community throughout the development process and help realize the same idea with its technical expertise.

Currently the project consists of an endoskeleton (endo) and modules.  The modules fit into the endo and hold all the pieces in place. These modules can be anything from processors to batteries to something that has yet to be designed.

Motorola plans has planned an alpha release of the Module Developer's Kit (MDK) for winter and says that it will also send an invitation to developers to start creating modules for the Ara platform.