Kogan Agora critics may be barking up the wrong tree

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 08 January 2009 07:40

Your IT - Mobility

'Spy' photos of the forthcoming Android-based Kogan Agora caused a kerfuffle, but there's a noticeable difference between what was shown and what will ship.

The Agora is attracting a lot of interest. Apart shaping up to be the first Android phone to go on sale in Australia, it's being offered at a remarkably low price point for a smart phone that's sold outright.

The basic model will be priced at $A299, or you could shell out an extra hundred bucks for the Pro version with a 2 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi connectivity and GPS. Don't forget that these are outright prices for unlocked phones.

Kogan's handset is scheduled to ship on January 29, having missed the original "by Christmas" target. The initially announced $199 price tag has also failed to materialise.

Two aspects of the handset came in for particular criticism when photos of a preproduction sample started circulating. One was that the the screen seems to be on the small side, and the other was the silver-coloured bezel that surrounds it.

The Agora was announced as having a 2.5 in touchscreen, and there's nothing about the photos to suggest it is any smaller than that. However, the sides of the bezel do appear wider than they did in the original product images supplied by Kogan as part of the original announcement.

As for the silver bezel, a Kogan spokesperson has confirmed that on production units "The area surrounding the LCD will be black, in line with the rest of the handset."

How successful the Agora will be remains the subject of speculation. The first Android phone sold in Australia is sure to attract some buyers for that reason alone. But compared with the world's first Android phone - the HTC-made G1 handset sold by T-Mobile in the US - the Agora has a physically smaller screen with half as many pixels.

This could cause problems with third-party applications if any developers have assumed the G1 represented the standard or minimum size. The Android SDK does provide a mechanism that allows programs to adapt to different resolutions, but it is up to developers to explicitly support particular resolutions.

Android developer "joshv" recently told an online discussion group "I've tested with QVGA [as used by the Agora] and honestly it's just not worth the effort to recode my apps to work well with half of the screen resolution. It's possible, but the end result wouldn't be something I'd consider to be a usable app. In fact I find the Android OS itself pretty much unusable at that resolution - but maybe I am just spoiled."

If that attitude is widespread among developers, software compatibility could be a problem for the Agora and other low-end Android phones.