Oh, Kogan -- we were so, so hopeful that you weren't peddling vaporware, and the latest indications seemed to suggest that the
Agora and Agora Pro were very much real devices. We wanted to root for the little guy, get another Android handset out into the unlocked market, review it, and love it to death. Unfortunately, scrappy Australian entrepreneur Ruslan Kogan has decided to delay the launch of his independently-designed phones indefinitely citing concerns over compatibility with future Android apps -- concerns that were likely raised in a hush-hush meeting he'd recently scored with Google. One issue, it seems, is that the Agora's screen resolution won't likely play nice with Android apps going forward; that doesn't seem quite right since the form factor is totally standard, but who really knows? The dude's had working prototypes on video, so we can't totally write it off just yet.
[Thanks Alex Z., and everyone who sent this in]
posted Jan 16th 2009 12:48AM
It was too good to be true. Anyhow let's wait for HTC's Touch HD Android device now.
did engadget just chnage name of entering comments.,email/pwrd.,????
bit un-professional in my opinion why didn't they design it, fully test it BEFORE telling people about it? At least studying android first and understanding screen resolution/sizes needs for the future would of been something of the design/idea stage.
Thanks for ruining my dreams of having an Android phone in the near future!
Yes!, death to QVGA!
That anti-QVGA guy on Engadget might be pretty happy.
I'm thinking the same, Google might be working on killing off QVGA, but that might not be so good a move since a lot of phones today are still QVGA and I imagine the cheaper Android phones would want to use it.
It always seemed like the Kogan wasn't an "official" Android phone, meaning they pretty much worked alone on it (should be true since they only had contact with Google so late in the game).
wow, so all android handsets are gonna need to be friggin slide outs or goliaths then? all i wanted was a generic qwerty candybar design, and this was it. grrr
wtf is this and why dies it feel like a college design project?
Seriously, it looks like an early draft of the Motorola Q9 someone quickly mocked up.
ironic, "Agora" in Portuguese means now.
and even more ironically, in Sichuanish, it means "Where is it?" and "Kogan" means "Thirsty".
I'm SHOCKED that this piece of vapourware is being delayed.
While I do appreciate the mention, I wish you'd linked to my story rather than a huge mega-corporation's story. The little guys need the traffic far more than the big guys.
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/22705/127/
:-)
Cheers
Alex.
True, but in this case The Age is one of Melbourne's biggest newspapers, and seeing as Kogan is based in Melbourne, it seems relevant enough
I wonder if it was a result of Kogan rushing to ride the Android wave, or Google being hush-hush on upcoming changes and whatnot.
Honestly I'm kind of hoping for the currently intended 'redesign' to come back looking like something from HTC instead of a Blackberry but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Also, one of the points behind the phone (from memory) was going to be the price. Originally Ruslan made mention of something around the $200 range the and there was a noticeable amount of griping when the Agora turned up with it's $300-$400 price-tag. I can imagine redesigning it with a higher resolution screen (W/VGA?) will also increase the price, though I don't really know the details behind those sort of things. Would that be the case?
"One potential issue is that developers may create applications for the Android operating system at a higher resolution and screen size than the Agora provides in its current form."
Does this mean that they will reduce the over sized bezel?
At any rate, I'm all for increasing screen size and resolution. Let's just hope they'll release something this year.
If Apps don't scale down to QVGA then they weren't written right. The Android SDK provides a bunch of tools to make sure that your App is resolution independant. Besides, Google promised that a future Market update would allow you to list minimum system requirements, so if you really, really need HVGA to work then you can simply make your App unavailable to QVGA users.
Maybe the apps themselves can scale to QVGA, however the OS itself cannot do QVGA that well.
I have Android running on my HTC Touch which is QVGA, while the OS works well all of the buttons do not scale to QVGA, they remain VGA and cause overlapping.
Some guy over on Slashdot is claiming there was some big meeting with Google folks and after the meeting he canceled all the phones and has since disappeared.
The iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular smartphones in the U.S. with a single model. Except for a very small list of obvious hardware differences between the iPhone and iPod touch, Apple’s mobile platform by now offers a uniform market of 20+ million users, all carrying an identically configured device. Same industrial design, same OS, same multi-touch UI, same iTunes multimedia content, same DRM, same peripherals, same purchasing process, and same coherency that has already resulted in 10,000+ apps and half a billion downloads at the App Store.
iPhone developers do not have to worry about differing UIs or device configurations. They don’t have to accommodate all kinds of input devices from trackballs to multi-touch to stylus. They don’t have to invent their own syncing or notification systems. They don’t have to negotiate for different app stores. And as Kogan found out too late, they don’t have to worry about “compatibility and interoperability in the near future” in the form of varying screen sizes and resolutions.
Ironically, if the iPhone platform can fail to dominate the smartphone market because it’s too closed, the Android platform may fail because it’s too open, as I explain here:
"Agora phone exposes Android's Achilles Heel"
http://counternotions.com/2009/01/19/agora/