Moto Mods ideas from third-party developers may turn into real products

Motorola continues to promote its Moto Mods modular accessories for its Moto Z family of smartphones, which add speakers, batteries, cameras and other functions via a magnetized back cover. It also wants to see more third-party developers come up with Moto Mods of their own. In January, the company held an event in India to help boost interest in making new accessories to those creators, and it held a similar event in San Francisco.

In a blog post and video, Motorola highlighted some of the more interesting ideas and prototypes that came out of the San Francisco event, such as a battery back cover that used solar power to charge up. The creators stated such a product could be fully charged in about 10 hours.

Another idea was called Simple Syrup, and was made for people with diabetes. The Moto Mod could be designed to track a user’s blood sugar readings. Yet another idea, called ModCoholic, was designed to be a breathalyzer that could detect a user’s alcohol level. Motorola will hold yet another Moto Mod developer event in China sometime in mid-March.

Motorola’s parent company Lenovo has already announced plans to help bring the best third-party Moto Mods ideas to market, via a $1 million fund from Lenovo Capital. The winning teams from all of these development events will be invited to Motorola’s headquarters in Chicago later this year to present their ideas to company representatives.  Lenovo Capital could select some of those teams to receive money from that $1 million fund to help them create and sell their Moto Mods.

Meanwhile, Motorola is likely to reveal a few of their own new Moto Mods in a few weeks as part of the 2017 Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain. One of them could be a 3D augmented reality camera add-on that will use Google’s Tango technology.