Predating the launch of Moto Mods in 2016, the first batch of Jolla The Other Half concepts included back covers with an extra E Ink display, an infrared camera, and an Angry Birds tie-in that activated themes and ringtones. But probably the most popular was a Blackberry/Nokia Communicator-style slider keyboard made and sold by two entrepreneurs from the original Jolla community. That trend is back in—at CES 2026, accessory company Clicks showed off a magnetic keyboard accessory you can slap on the back of any Qi2 or MagSafe smartphone, though it uses Bluetooth for connectivity.

Quite a bit has changed in what’s achievable, not least more bandwidth, more capability, and more accessible, high-quality 3D printing. “We have seven pogo pins [on the Jolla Phone] which give you the capability to get power out and power in,” says Jolla CEO Sami Pienimäki. “So you can do maybe wireless charging, and you can power external circuit boards.” Pienimäki imagines E Ink interfaces or low-bandwidth radios on the back of its upcoming phone—it has an I3C interface, which delivers bit rates up to 12 megabits per second, allowing data to flow between the phone and the mod, enabling new kinds of smarter modular accessories.

Jolla has promised to release the final phone specifications by the end of the month, with shipping due for the first preorder customers at the end of June. Pienimäki teases that it’s “tempting” for him to release one of Jolla’s own internal concepts for a TOH back cover even earlier as “a showcase of what you can actually do.” (The Jolla Phone doesn’t have FCC approval in the US, but the company is considering a US launch in the future.)

With more than 10,000 preorders since December 2025, Jolla is back in business but still far from mainstream. So why, despite plenty of internet hype over the years, did truly modular phones never quite take off?

“During the LTE days, there was thinking that these devices would morph into ‘cloud phones,’ where the rest of the phone could be cost-optimized,” Fieldhack says. “Swappable parts and lower costs, as most of the compute would be done in the cloud.”

But things changed as flagship phones went from costing $350 to around $1,000. Both the camera and media production and consumption became much more important: “Great displays, great cameras, multiple cameras, more memory, better sound and mics, as well as more elegant and thin devices—this is not easily done on a modular smartphone,” Fieldhack says. “There are huge compromises, and phones are thicker and heavier with less performance. Then, agentic AI, on-device for lower costs and better security, made modular design even less optimal.”

Repairable Modules

One strong and emerging argument for true hardware modularity is repairability. Another European smartphone maker, Fairphone, has been making that case for over a decade. “It’s about thinking about how do we group the actual phone itself into modules?” says Fairphone chief technology officer Chandler Hatton. The latest FairPhone Gen 6 smartphone is made up of 12 modules. A customer sitting at the kitchen table with a single T5 screwdriver (included) and a guitar pick can repair the phone quickly, easily, and cheaply.

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As the Trump administration phases out the use of animal experimentation across the federal government, a biotech startup has a bold idea for an alternative to animal testing: nonsentient “organ sacks.”

Bay Area-based R3 Bio has been quietly pitching the idea to investors and in industry publications as a way to replace lab animals without the ethical issues that come with living organisms. That’s because these structures would contain all of the typical organs—except a brain, rendering them unable to think or feel pain. The company’s long-term goal, cofounder Alice Gilman says, is to make human versions that could be used as a source of tissues and organs for people who need them.

For Immortal Dragons, a Singapore-based longevity fund that’s invested in R3, the idea of replacement is a core strategy for human longevity. “We think replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” says CEO Boyang Wang. “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”

For now, R3 is aiming to make monkey organ sacks. “The benefit of using models that are more ethical and are exclusively organ systems would be that testing can be meaningfully more scalable,” Gilman says. (R3’s name comes from the philosophy in animal research known as the three R’s—replacement, reduction, and refinement—developed by British scientists William Russell and Rex Burch in 1959 to promote humane experimentation.)

New drugs are often tested in monkeys before they’re given to human participants in clinical trials. For instance, monkeys were critical during the Covid-19 pandemic for testing vaccines and therapeutics. But they’re also an expensive resource, and their numbers are dwindling in the US after China banned the export of nonhuman primates in 2020.

Animal rights activists have long pushed to end research on monkeys, and one of the seven federally funded primate research facilities across the country has signaled it would consider shutting down and transitioning into a sanctuary amid growing pressure. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also winding down monkey research, part of a bigger trend across the government to reduce reliance on animal testing.

As a result, Gilman says, there aren’t enough research monkeys left in the US to allow for necessary research if another pandemic threat emerges. Enter organ sacks.

Organ sacks would in theory offer advantages over existing organs-on-chips or tissue models, which lack the full complexity of whole organs, including blood vessels.

Gilman says it’s already possible to create mouse organ sacks that lack a brain, though she and cofounder John Schloendorn deny that R3 has made them. (For the record, Gilman doesn’t like the term “brainless” to describe the organ sacks. “It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want,” she says.) Gilman and Schloendorn would not say how exactly they plan to create the monkey and human organ sacks, but said they are exploring a combination of stem-cell technology and gene editing.

It’s plausible that organ sacks could be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells, says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis. These stem cells come from adult skin cells and are reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state. They have the potential to form into any cell or tissue in the body and have been used to create embryo-like structures that resemble the real thing. By editing these stem cells, scientists could disable genes needed for brain development. The resulting embryo could then be incubated until it grows into organized organ structures.