Kogan delays Agora Android phone to better serve developers

January 16, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

How much do third-party developers matter to the mobile handset manufacturers building for Google’s Android operating system? Enough to indefinitely delay the Kogan Agora, a device that intended to be the second Android-powered phone in the world, after HTC’s G1.

Here’s more about the Arora problem, from Australia-based Kogan founder and chief executive Ruslan Kogan:

One of the potential issues is the screen size and resolution. It seems developers will be creating applications that are a higher resolution than the Agora is currently capable of handling…. In order to fully appreciate the feature-rich applications Android developers will be creating in coming months and years, the Agora must be redesigned.

There you have it. The phone was days away from shipping — and was apparently otherwise in good shape — but the company was so worried that it couldn’t handle other people’s applications that the device is going back to the drawing board. That’s even though there aren’t very many Android apps right now. The company is sending a full refund to anyone who pre-ordered.

Let me put it another way: Kogan expects third-party devices to be so key to Android that its willing to lose what can only be many millions of dollars as well as cede the number two Android-phone title.

Meanwhile, of course, a range of other companies are working on their own Android phones, from white-label manufacturers in China to consumer-facing brands. And as we’ve covered extensively, you can expect to see the Android OS on netbooks if not other devices within the next couple of years.

The silver lining for Kogan, though, is that even if it loses its Android thunder to competitors, it’s already gotten a ton of worldwide publicity for its efforts.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Welcome to the pitfall of "open." The good news of totally open platforms is that you can pretty much do anything with it. The bad news of totally open platforms is that when you are trying to deliver a superior user experience, you either have to take on the burden of supporting "anything" or you have to set limits on what will work on your particular instantiation of the open platform, which of course, makes it less open, reducing leverage across the entirety of the ecosystem.

    That's not to say that these aren't solvable problems, but is suggestive that the inevitability of Android is far from a straight line.

    Cheers,

    Mark
  • TedHoward
    Wait until someone introduces a massively-widescreen or massively-tall portrait device and they notice that the 1,000's of Android apps in existence look awful on it because they don't intelligently and dynamic rearrange their UI to take advantage of the screen size. How about all those apps working on the mythical Android-based netbook?
  • Craig Baker
    Seems to me that Google put significant pressure on Kogan not to release this phone. Google have a huge interest in the success of Android. If this phone turned out to be of low quality it would have done significant damage to the Android brand.

    The small screen size story is rubbish. Android has been designed from day one to work on a variety of resolution. Android lets applications support various resolution using different layout files for each resolution. Application developers are well equipped to deal with varying resolutions.

    Kudos to Kogan for giving it a shot, but it was always going to be a mammoth task for a little guy to deliver.
  • Craig, it seems to me that you and Kogan are saying the same thing -- the phone sucked too much to release, so back to the drawing board. Specifically, it sucked so much that the company was worried that developers wouldn't even be interested. Not clear to me if Google even had a hand in it, although of course possible that they would.