Phonebloks - the future for a longer lasting phone?

I somehow came across this video that caught my attention. It's a video that proposes an idea of how we can stop wasting electronic devices so much (and so often), and more specifically in this video how to keep your mobile phone last longer – with a new kind of phone that is made of detachable blocks.

When mobile phones are continuously being developed with more and yet more advanced features and sold in the market, sooner or later you will come to a point where you realize that your still two-year-old phone is already considered ancient. This will often lead you to the decision to go ahead and throw away your already Stone Aged phone to buy a new, modern, better, faster, thinner phone. And here is where the idea in the video comes in.

Instead of getting rid of the whole phone just to replace one or two certain components, how about actually buying those two new components and building them into your phone yourself? They call all these different components in a phone for “blocks”, thus naming the phone “Phonebloks”. Whenever you want to upgrade something, you can just pull that block out from the back of your phone and replace it with the newer one. The rest of the phone usually works fine except for just that one thing, be it the camera or the storage space that you want upgraded. This way, you would save the environment from wasting the whole phone and instead just throw away one small piece of it. This solution would lead to much less mobile phone waste.

How or whether this idea would actually work in reality is not clear, but it sure is a clever and interesting idea in my opinion. You can customize the phone with whatever “blocks” (components) you want, so I see great potential for it to be successful. Some user comments state that this can't work technically while others are more positive. I don't think it's impossible since we have invented and developed a lot of things today that in the past was considered “not or probably not possible”. Think of the upcoming curved phones, for instance. This idea of a phone is brought up with the environment in mind. I think the development of technology and technical devices should work more towards this mindset and promote the environmentally-friendly aspects of the new devices, rather than solely focus on the new features.

The video promoting the idea is 2:47 minutes long. You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDAw7vW7H0c