Tech giant to test modular smartphone in Puerto Rico

Google said on Wednesday that it will unveil a modular smartphone in Puerto Rico this year as part of a pilot program that will allow people to choose their own hard-ware based on their needs and interests.

The company will partner with Mexico-based carrier Claro and local carrier Open Mobile to offer the product, which will be sold from freestanding stores that look like food trucks, said Jessica Beavers, a Google marketing executive.

She said Puerto Rico was chosen in part because more than 90 percent of house-holds on the island of nearly 3.7 million people use a cell-phone and 77 percent of Internet access occurs through mobile devices.

"All of this makes for a truly interesting carrier land scape," she said at a module developers conference at Google's headquarters in California. "Mobile devices are a huge part of daily life" in Puerto Rico.

The pilot program is still being developed, but Beavers said she envisions stores first opening in the capital of San Juan, followed by Ponce, the island's second-largest city. Stores would eventually open in other cities.

Google would manufacture and sell the phone frame as well as modules created by individual manufacturers that can be added to it like Legos. Modules would range from a screen to a camera to speakers to even a pedometer, depending on people's needs.

"We want people to walk away and say, 'That was really freaking awesome,'" Beavers said.

Google says it's too early to say how much the phone could cost, but it might be in the $50to $100range.

The company has had success with its Chrome-book computers, which are lightweight, low-priced lap-tops that require Internet connections to access most programs and other features, but it relies on out side manufacturers for the product.

It has had more difficulty selling devices it makes on its own. Google Glass, its Internet-connected eye-wear, still hasn't made it to the mass market more than two years after its release to developers and a digital media player called the Nexus Q was scrapped within a few months of its unveiling in 2012.

Rafael Leon, a Radio Shack employee in San Juan, said he expects many Puerto Ricans to embrace the modular phone, noting that they are always eager to buy the newest mobile devices and don't mind standing in long lines.

"They always want to be ahead with what's newest, with what's innovative," he said, adding that despite the island's long economic slump, cellphone sales have always been good." You tell them it costs $800 and they 'renotfazed."