According to the Nikkei business wire, Toshiba announced today that the company will be providing the processing guts for Google's upcoming Project Ara modular smartphones. The release itself is pretty bare-bones - Toshiba says it will provide 3 different types of processors for the phone, and that while it will initially be the "preferred" supplier for those components, it will become their sole provider a year after Ara's initial rollout.

Perhaps more interestingly, the story claims that Ara smartphones will start at prices as cheap as $50. What's not clear, exactly, is what that will include - does that come with a display? Battery? Processor? RAM? Storage? The number is tantalizing, though, and will certainly make waves if it ends up being true.

Each Ara phone will have 5-10 module slots, depending on the size of the device and the modules. Otherwise, there's not much to this story - it's pretty cut and dry. The one thing I'd wonder is just what sort of processors Toshiba will be providing. My guess would be the company is going to fabricate reference design-based ARM processors, similar to those sold by firms like MediaTek. There's still a lot we don't know about Project Ara, and it seems with every new piece of information even more questions arise.

Nikkei