Why delay of the Kogan Android phone is good news for Google

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 19 January 2009 08:58

IT Industry - Strategy

Has eWeek gone nuts? Google has been saved from a public relations disaster by the withdrawal of the Kogan Android phone, with suggestions that Google may well have been behind the decision by Ruslan Kogan to pull the project and redesign the Agora. Maybe Google even funded the cancellation?

eWeek has published a rather perplexing article that tries to make the argument that the cancellation of the Kogan Agora is “bad news for Google”.

What a load of tosh! It would have done Google no good at all to have an Android phone on the market that end users and developers largely complained about, for bad Kogan Agora press would have surely rubbed off on Google itself, even if Google ultimately had little to do with the Agora’s development.

After all, the problem with the Agora seems to stem from the screen and its resolution simply being too small, at 320x240, compared with the T-Mobile G1 gPhone having a 320x480 resolution instead.

With developers threatening not to bother re-issuing their software to work on smaller screens, it seemed to seal the Agora’s fate, although this appears incredibly short sighted and selfish of those developers. There are lots of phones out there with different screen sizes, after all.

Had Kogan actually conferred with Google to start with, Google may have insisted from the start the proposed screen resolution was going to be too small.

And if Ruslan Kogan did talk with Google, and Google initially gave it the green light, then I certainly hope Google is helping Kogan to fund what must be a very expensive cancellation, especially if claims that production was underway and the start of shipments to paying customers was but days away.

There is no confirmation of any of this, however, leading us to only speculate. But we do know the project was cancelled because of the screen size and resolution, which would have greatly disappointed users, according to Kogan.

Thus the phone is being redesigned and will come out in the future (if at all).

In the meantime, plenty of other Android phones are on the way.

Continued on page 2, please read on!