Kogan Agora
When the Kogan Agora Android phone was announced last year with a hardware/software design and manufacture measuring only a few months I was sceptical.
First of all, current phones from today’s top OEMs take much longer than this to develop. The testing phase itself for some phones can be several months. Even when you have the OS (Android), it’s a significant amount of effort to get things like device drivers working with the particular hardware. There are also things like codecs that I believe aren’t in the Android open source.
Nevertheless, I didn’t comment at the time because an open mobile OS was new ground. Maybe, it would indeed allow phones to be developed in very short periods of time. In fact, I hoped the Agora was for real because this had implications on how many other companies could easily create Android devices.
Hence, I was disappointed but not too surprised when the Agora Android phone became "delayed indefinitely". However, I was surprised that this was because of compatibility problems with the chosen screen resolution that would limit compatibility with future applications.
I wonder how complete the phone actually became. Can a phone really be created in such a short space of time or were there other factors that also caused the phone to be delayed indefinitely?
The compatibility problem is something I touched on last year. While it’s easy to create one phone such as the G1 (and say iPhone), it’s a lot more complex to ensure application compatibility as hardware evolves significantly.
As the S60 5th edition shows, even when you achieve compatibility, it’s often desirable to rewrite applications to make use of new features (such as S60 touch controls) and improve usability. Hence, it might be argued that, in the long term, it’s impossible to achieve compatibility while maximising usability.
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