Story

"It seems that everyone in the phone industry wants to keep everything as proprietary and locked-down as possible"

I think that's the reason this won't go very far, not in the US anyway. Phone vendors want to keep the idea of phone + phone plan together. They want the upgrade to be an incentive to stick with contracts, so I'd think the last thing they'd want is a modular phone that allows a person to swap out the radio module for $30 and go with another vendor.

Personally I'd like to see this happen. I was shopping around for a SMALL Android Phone and hardly any qualified for what I wanted. The Sony Xperia looked like a well rounded phone in the profile I wanted, but each model missed a different key feature I wanted - really, it's like they read my mind and omitted a different thing on each phone model to piss off me specifically. If I could have taken the features I wanted and glued them together, I would have bought one.